Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]

PRIVATE BUSINESS

LONDON TRANSPORT (No. 2) BILL (By Order)

Read a Second time and committed.

BRIGHTON MARINA BILL (By Order)

Second Reading deferred till Wednesday next.

GREATER LONDON COUNCIL (GENERAL POWERS (No. 2) BILL (By Order)

Second Reading deferred till Thursday next at Seven o'clock.

Oral Answers to Questions — POST OFFICE

Rhodesia (Mail)

Mr. Evelyn King: asked the Postmaster-General why, in the light of an assurance given to the House on 7th February, 1966, that there is no censorship of mail to or from Rhodesia a printed slip appeared on an envelope bearing the postmark 12th October, 1966, and addressed to Rhodesia, which the hon. Member for South Dorset has sent to him, indicating that the Post Office in the United Kingdom had opened the envelope for examination.

The Assistant Postmaster-General (Mr. Joseph Slater): This letter was opened for normal Customs examination, to which mail to and from all overseas is liable. I repeat the assurances given to the House on 7th February, 1966–[Vol. 724, c. 31]—and on several subsequent occasions, that in this country there has been and is no censorship to and from Rhodesia.

Mr. King: Whatever the purpose, does not the slip state—and I have another with me—that the packet was opened and examined by the Post Office? Would not it have been better, at the time that the Question was asked and answered, to have said that?

Mr. Slater: There has been a continuing misunderstanding about this matter. It began shortly after the illegal declaration of independence, when letters from Rhodesia arriving here bore the censor's stamp and when some people who received those leters in this country assumed that we had applied the stamp.

Printed Matter (Sealed Plastic Containers)

Mr. Ridley: asked the Postmaster-General if he will allow sealed plastic containers used as envelopes for printed matter to pay only the cheap rate for postage for printed matter.

Mr. Joseph Slater: No, Sir. We must be able to open printed paper packets easily and so check that their contents are eligible for this cheap-rate service.

Mr. Ridley: Would the hon. Gentleman explain why the Post Office persists with the ridiculous practice of having a cheap rate at all? Surely it would be easier to check that a material is circular matter if one were able to see through the envelope because it is transparent? Would not the hon. Gentleman agree that it would be easier to police this by using this method than by having to open envelopes and inspect them?

Mr. Slater: We must be able to examine all the contents if we are to verify that the conditions laid down for the service are being met. For the information of the hon. Gentleman, transparent envelopes are not permitted in the international or inland postal services.

Special Stamps

Mr. Stodart: asked the Postmaster-General why he has refused to devote one out of the five special issues in this year's stamp programme to the two anniversaries which are to be celebrated in Edinburgh.

The Postmaster-General (Mr. Edward Short): I would refer the hon. Gentleman to the reply I gave to the hon. Member


for Edinburgh, North (Earl of Dalkeith) and to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Aberdeen, North (Mr. Hector Hughes) on 30th November.—[Vol. 737, c. 97.]

Mr. Stodart: Is not the right hon. Gentleman aware that those replies were thoroughly unsatisfactory? Will he say why the issue of one of the three special stamps to do with British flora, British discoveries or British paintings could not have been postponed until next year, so as to allow for the issue of a stamp in favour of the two anniversaries commemorating Edinburgh's contribution to architecture and modern art?

Mr. Short: I appreciate the importance of this matter. I had more than 60 suggestions and it is difficult to be objective about this. There will be new regional stamps following the new definitive stamps coming out this year, and I believe that they will prove to be the most beautiful postage stamps ever produced in this country. In addition, there may be some Scottish pictures or pictures commemorating Scottish discoveries or wild flowers in the other sets which the hon. Gentleman mentioned.

Postal Services (Productivity)

Mr. Marquand: asked the Postmaster-General what are his plans for increasing productivity in the postal services.

Mr. Edward Short: In co-operation with outside consultants we are making thorough-going studies of methods and procedures and staffing techniques at counters in sorting offices and clerical offices. In addition we have a large-scale programme to mechanise mail handling
and sorting processes, which I announced recently.
All these projects are expected to contribute substantially to increasing postal productivity.

Mr. Marquand: I welcome that reply, but is my right hon. Friend aware that in London and many other big cities postmen still deliver letters to each separate flat in blocks of flats whereas on the Continent tenants of flats generally have to provide locked letter boxes on the ground floor? Will he circulate in the OFFICIAL REPORT an estimate of the improvement

in productivity which would result if that practice were adopted in this country?

Mr. Short: It would not be possible to assess that with any degree of accuracy. We are, of course, grateful for the cooperation of local authorities and property developers in allowing this sort of thing to be done. It helps a great deal, especially in London where the labour shortage is acute.

Mr. Ridsdale: How can the right hon. Gentleman say that productivity is being increased when services are being cut and charges are being raised? Are not this Government a Government who get things done to the detriment of the consumer?

Mr. Short: We are certainly a Government who get things done. To come back to the Question and away from the generalities, I have announced that we were starting an enormous programme of modernisation. By the mid-1970s, this will be saving the Post Office £10 million a year, which will give us a return of 25 per cent. on our capital.

Giro System

Mr. Raphael Tuck: asked the Postmaster-General (1) why the Giro Directorate's plans, published in the booklet "The National Giro", are in several important respects in conflict with the Motion agreed by this House on 21st July, 1965, and with the White Paper, Command Paper No. 2751, entitled "A Post Office Giro"; and whether he will provide a giro service in accordance with the terms of both the Motion and the White Paper;
(2) whether, in view of the fact that one of the avowed reasons for establishing a giro system was the reduction of opportunity for crime, he will implement paragraph 10 of the White Paper to the effect that a statement of account would be sent to each account holder whenever there was a change in the balance held.

Mr. Joseph Slater: The booklet amplified the description in the White Paper of the services to be provided by the Post Office but it did not depart in any material way from the principles of that Paper or of the Motion to which my hon. Friend has referred. We believe it is


right to allow Giro account holders to choose whether to receive a statement whenever there is a change in the balance or less frequently.

Mr. Tuck: Can my hon. Friend reconcile the statement in the White Paper that there will be provision of cheap facilities for cash remittances of any amount with the statement in the booklet that the minimum transfer allowed will be 5s?

Mr. Slater: Market research has shown that there will be a negligible proportion of account holders wishing to transfer individual amounts of less than 5s.

New Road Sub-Post Office, Solihull

Mr. Grieve: asked the Postmaster-General whether he is aware that there is dissatisfaction in Solihull with the proposal to close the New Road sub-post office; and whether he will reconsider his decision in this matter.

Mr. Joseph Slater: My right hon. Friend has reconsidered the matter in the light of the local representations brought to his notice by the hon. and learned Gentleman and others. But he is sorry that he would not be justified in keeping open the sub-post office after the new main post office becomes available only some 500 yards away.

Mr. Grieve: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that this is causing great dissatisfaction to people who have used the sub-post office for many years? How many people does he want to make a protest before he reconsiders his decision?

Mr. Slater: One always gets some type of protest whenever one seeks to give improved conditions. Some people are not prepared to accept change. I agree that a great deal of concern has been shown about this, but the additional distance people will now have to travel to the new head post office is not very great and, like the sub-post office, the new office will be in the main shopping centre, which people will wish to visit anyway. I do not think that there will be any serious inconvenience.

Oral Answers to Questions — TELEPHONE SERVICE

Glasgow-London Lines (Congestion)

Mr. Edward M. Taylor: asked the Postmaster-General what information he has regarding the congestion of telephone

lines between Glasgow and London during normal business hours; and what plans he has to improve the situation.

Mr. Joseph Slater: I am aware that there has been some congestion on the lines between London and Glasgow. We expect to provide 100 additional circuits on this route between now and March, which will augment the facilities by 14 per cent.

Mr. Taylor: I am obliged to the hon. Gentleman for that Answer. Does he accept that a serious problem exists and that many telephone operators in Glasgow are in danger of becoming nervous wrecks as a result of constantly hearing a voice saying, "All lines to London are engaged, please try later"? Does he consider that 100 additional circuits will he enough and has he any further plans?

Mr. Slater: This is progress, and we are improving the position.

United Kingdom-United States of America (Lines)

Mr. Boston: asked the Postmaster-General (1) how many additional lines have been installed between the United Kingdom and the United States of America in the six months from June, 1966, to December, 1966; and how many are planned for the current year up to 31st December, 1967;
(2) if he is satisfied that there are adequate telephone lines between the United Kingdom and the United States of America available for communication between 2·30 p.m. and 5 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, and, especially, between 3 p.m. and 3·30 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Joseph Slater: Twenty-five additional lines to the United States of America were installed between June and December, 1966, and 27 more are planned for 1967. These increases should meet traffic growth and reduce delays.

Mr. Boston: The news of these extra lines will be very welcome indeed. Does my hon. Friend appreciate that delays can have a very serious effect on exporters, especially during the peak period, and is he satisfied that these extra lines will go a long way towards meeting present demands?

Mr. Slater: Yes, Sir. These new lines will improve the position. We now have no fewer than 150 lines between London and the United States of America. The Post Office has little or no control over the delay outside the afternoon period. The average delay during the afternoon period is usually 30 minutes, but most calls are booked in advance and these are generally connected a few minutes before or after the wanted time.

Sir J. Langford-Holt: Why is it that when one makes a telephone call from New York to the United Kingdom one is connected within a matter of seconds but that when one makes a call from the United Kingdom to New York it takes considerably longer to get connected?

Mr. Slater: I do not know from where the hon. Gentleman gets his information. The average delay in the service is similar in both directions.

Castle Bromwich

Mr. Rowland: asked the Postmaster-General if he will explain the delay in the installation of equipment in the Castle Bromwich Telephone Exchange sufficient to meet the anticipated volume of demand by the dates originally promised to existing or future subscribers.

Mr. Joseph Slater: The demand for telephones at Castle Bromwich is extremely high, as a result of housing developments in the area. We have planned a series of equipment and building extensions for the exchange designed to meet this situation. The first of these was delayed by several months and I regret that in consequence dates given in good faith to certain subscribers could not he met.

Mr. Rowland: The Assistant Postmaster-General will know that there is a good deal of exasperation at Castle Bromwich about this. Can he tell the House how many people were given promises which have not been fulfilled and what steps have now been taken to deal with the situation? About the delays in the supply of equipment, who is the contractor from whom it comes?

Mr. Slater: Taking the last point first, Associated Electrical Industries Limited is the contractor. However, building

delays have contributed to the situation. As regards promised dates, the 200 applicants who were originally promised connection by July, 1966, either did not receive it until recently or are still waiting. As for the steps that we are now taking, two extensions are in progress and four more are being programmed.

Sir T. Brinton: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that this is by no means an uncommon occurrence? In my own constituency of Kidderminster, after promises going back 18 months that new equipment would be available at the Kidderminster Exchange by December, we are now informed that it will be mid-May, by which time 700 people will be waiting to be connected?

Mr. Slater: I have every sympathy with the hon. Gentleman and with other hon. Members who raise these issues. But 900 equipment contracts have been responsible for the delay.

Party Lines (Tape Recording)

Mr. Kenneth Lewis: asked the Postmaster-General what action he proposes to take to prevent tape recording of conversations on party telephones by one party recording the conversations of the other.

Mr. Short: The Telephone Regulations forbid the attachment of any device to a telephone installation without my approval. Authority to connect a recording machine to a shared line is given only when the Post Office has the written consent of the partner.

Mr. Lewis: Is the Postmaster-General aware, first, that I am very happy that he got my Question right? I thought, on rereading it, that he might have thought that I was referring to either the Parliamentary Labour Party or to the 1922 Committee.

Mr. Speaker: Order. Question Time is Question Time.

Mr. Lewis: The Postmaster-General must agree that there is a great deal of misuse in this connection and that it has been obvious from various cases reported in the Press that party-line systems can be misused. Does he not think that it would be better if we got rid of party lines altogether and gave everybody separate: telephones?

Mr. Short: That is the ultimate objective, but I regret to say that it is still some way off. I share the hon. Gentleman's fears about this. I think that the recent divorce case gave rise to many fears. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary answered a Question on this. It is not by any means a straightforward matter. We are certainly aware of the problem and are studying it.

Sir J. Langford-Holt: The right hon. Gentleman said that it is illegal to attach anything to a telephone. Is he not aware that it is quite possible to take a recording of a telephone conversation without attaching anything to a telephone? Is that illegal?

Mr. Short: I did not say that it was illegal. I said that it was forbidden by the Telephone Regulations. The weakness of this—let me say this clearly—is that there is no real penalty. The only penalty is for the Post Office to take the phone out, which we tried to do in the recent case—but the gentleman had moved, I understand. That is the weakness of the present situation, but we are looking at this. We are well aware of the other problem mentioned by the hon. Gentleman. I am sure that this is probably becoming an even greater danger in this age of miniaturisation, when it is possible to bug a phone and to bug many other things as well.

Woldingham Automatic Exchange

Mr. Frederic Harris: asked the Postmaster-General why, at approximately 1·45 p.m. on Sunday, 29th January, it took nearly 20 minutes and more than 200 rings on the telephone at Woldingham 2365 to get the operator to answer; and what action he proposes to take to improve this service.

Mr. Joseph Slater: This was due to an intermittent fault between Woldingham automatic exchange and the switchboard, which had not been detected by routine testing. I am sorry for the inconvenience.

Mr. Harris: Will the hon. Gentleman note that these intermittent faults are constantly occurring, and will he make sure that, until there is an improvement in the service, there can be no question of increasing telephone rentals?

Mr. Slater: The circuits at this exchange between Woldingham and the

switchboard are systematically tested. The fault was intermittent, as I have said, and it was of a type which was not detectable by the normal testing procedures. With the best will in the world, we cannot prevent occasional failures of this kind.

Telephone Service (Shirley)

Mr. Grieve: asked the Postmaster-General whether he is aware that telephone subscribers in Shirley were without telephone communication between 11 a.m. Wednesday, 25th January, and 1·30 p.m. on Friday, 27th January, and again on Saturday, 28th January; what was the reason for this breakdown; and what proposals he has to prevent its repetition.

Mr. Joseph Slater: These breakdowns were caused by moisture penetrating a cable following heavy rain and by damage when a trench collapsed during repairs. A new cable has been prov4ed. Cables are being gas pressurised and new sheathing materials introduced to minimise such interruptions.

Mr. Grieve: I am grateful for that explanation, but is the Minister aware that there have been further breakdowns since I put down my Question, and will he take steps to see that the people of Shirley are spared that kind of breakdown?

Mr. Slater: Yes, Sir. Every precaution is taken. The matter is still under observation by the Department.

Kiosks (Coin Boxes)

Mr. Hector Hughes: asked the Postmaster-General why the 3d. slots in telephone kiosks in some places but not in others are made unusable by the insertion of metal wedges, thus depriving the public of 3d. telephone calls; whether similar 3d. slots elsewhere remain available for public use; and if he will now restore the 3d. slots for public use generally.

Mr. Edward Short: All pay-on-answer coin boxes are being modified in this way to carry into effect the decision that from the New Year the minimum charge for any call from these coin boxes would be 6d. The fitting of wedges, which I do not propose to abandon, necessarily takes time, during which a decreasing number of 3d. slots remains usable.

Mr. Hughes: Does my right hon. Friend not realise that this is a very unsatisfactory state of affairs, that it is a gross interference with the rights of British citizens of small means to communicate urgently with each other, and that he should resort to previous practice?

Mr. Short: The call boxes were losing £4 million a year, and this is simply a matter of saving money.

Old People (Cheap Telephone Communications)

Mr. Rose: asked the Postmaster-General what progress has been made in the system of cheap telephone communications for the elderly, introduced experimentally in Manchester.

Mr. Joseph Slater: Forty pairs of equipment are available. Over 750 cases have been investigated by Manchester Corporation Welfare Department, 90 submitted for trial, and 36 connected successfully. Difficulties have been experienced in finding and arranging suitable partners within the range and technical limitations of the equipment.

Mr. Rose: While I accept that the system is still at the experimental stage, would my hon. Friend not agree that it would be a very great boon to many elderly and disabled people, and when will he be in a position to say whether the scheme can be extended to other areas?

Mr. Slater: We are awaiting the conclusion of the experiment, and we hope to have that in our possession shortly. If we think that it is a great success, there will be no reason why it should not be extended.

Oral Answers to Questions — WIRELESS AND TELEVISION

Television (Broadcasting Time)

Mr. Bryan: asked the Postmaster General what representations he has received from shift workers regarding his decision to continue his restriction of the permitted hours of television broadcasting; and what reply he has sent.

Mr. Stratton Mills: asked the Postmaster General what representations he received from commercial television companies prior to the publication of the

White Paper on Broadcasting on the question of the extension of broadcasting hours; and why he refused to sanction any such increase in broadcasting time.

Mr. Edward Short: The Independent Television Authority as the public corporation responsible for the service has put representations to me on this subject to the effect that my powers to prescribe the amount of broadcasting time should not be used or, failing that, that I should authorise a large increase in the amount. As the White Paper states, the Government do not consider that any general increase will be justified for the present. I have received two letters from shift workers. In reply, I have explained the Government's views as set out in the White Paper.

Mr. Bryan: May I appeal to the right hon. Gentleman to look at this from a viewer's point of view? What are the practical difficulties in allowing more hours of T.V. when the I.T.V. companies are willing to provide them? It one is afraid of representations from the B.B.C., it has, after all, the advantages of two channels and a monopoly in radio.

Mr. Short: I would point out that the number of hours broadcasting per week in this country is double that of the next nearest country in Europe and we have the lowest licence in Europe. 1 do not think that there is any case for a general increase at the moment.

Mr. Stratton Mills: Did the right hon. Gentleman consider this on its merits, or was it part of an arrangement come to by his predecessor with the B.B.C. last March? Was part of that proposal, so as to keep the B.B.C. licence steady, that the independent television companies could not increase their hours, despite the fact that there would be no additional cost to the viewer?

Mr. Short: The chief factor is the use of resources. When we want to develop the television system—and yesterday I announced the biggest development yet introduced—we have to weigh one thing against another.

Local Radio Stations

Mr. Bryan: asked the Postmaster-General if he will estimate the capital expenditure and running costs of the nine


stations which are to be formed for the 12-month experiment in local sound radio.

Captain Orr: asked the Postmaster-General what proportion of the population in those areas to be covered by the proposed experimental local radio stations he estimates will be able to receive their programmes.

Mr. Stratton Mills: asked the Postmaster-General what representations he has received from universities, chambers of trade and commerce, local councils of churches, art associations and other representative bodies active in the social and cultural life of the community as to their willingness to make a financial contribution to the local sound radio experiment; and how much he estimates that these bodies are willing to pay.

Mr. Mawby: asked the Postmaster-General what discussions he has had with the Council of Churches, the universities and art associations regarding his proposal that they should contribute towards an experiment in local sound radio.

Mr. Ian Gilmour: asked the Postmaster-General (1) what he estimates will be the additional annual cost to the British Broadcasting Corporation of the proposals contained in the White Paper on Broadcasting;
(2) if he will ensure that the nine stations taking part in the local radio experiment will cover a reasonable variety of environments, including rural areas.

Mr. Berry: asked the Postmaster-General what representations he has received from universities, chambers of trade and commerce, local councils of churches, arts associations, and other representative bodies active in the social and cultural life of the community as to their willingness to make a financial contribution to the local sound radio experiment.

Mr. Eyre: asked the Postmaster-General (1) if he will invite commercial undertakings to take part in his proposed experiment in local sound radio;
(2) from what source he expects local authorities to raise money with which to support his proposed experiment in local sound radio.

Mr. Crawshaw: asked the Postmaster-General when he expects to give authority for the setting up of local broadcasting stations; and whether he will bear in mind the claim for Liverpool to be included in those first chosen for this experiment.

Dr. John Dunwoody: asked the Postmaster-General if each of the nine local radio stations will be sited in those areas at present deprived of B.B.C.2 television, the live theatre and the arts.

Mr. Edward Short: The capital expenditure on the sound radio proposals in the White Paper is estimated at £300,000. Annual running costs will be about £700,000 by 1968–69, about £500,000 of which will be incurred on the local radio experiment. Part of this will be met by local contributions. Discussions are going on between the B.B.C. and local authorities which are taking soundings of other local bodies and organisations. These inquiries are additional to those I made before the White Paper. Local authorities may contribute in respect of services for which they have responsibilities, and in the provision and conduct of which the local radio station would be of value. These contributions would form part of the expenditure on their services, but there would be no specific subvention for the station as such.
The places for the experiment will be chosen as quickly as possible. I expect the B.B.C.'s proposals within a period of weeks and I shall lose no time in considering them. The prime consideration will be to obtain, through selecting a cross section of localities, the widest range of information and experience from the experiment.
The Government are determined to maintain the public service principle, but I think there would be general agreement that it would not be sensible to set up a new broadcasting authority for the experiment.

Mr. Bryan: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that no one in this House has ever heard of 10 Questions on such a wide variety of subjects being taken together? One can only assume that it is defensive tactics after yesterday's humiliation——

Mr. Speaker: Order. Question, please.

Mr. Bryan: The White Paper states that the money will not be raised from rates. Does that mean that the money will be raised from rates, but that that will not be revealed in the rate demand?

Mr. Short: What the rate demand reveals is a matter for the local authority. But I imagine that, if the local radio station puts on, for example, an educational programme, part of the education rate will cover the cost of it.

Mr. Stratton Mills: May I refer the right hon. Gentleman to the bodies mentioned in Question No. 16? Would he say how much these bodies have promised to contribute to the scheme? Would he say specifically how many of these bodies were represented at the conference on 27th January held by the B.B.C. to discuss the whole prospects of local sound radio?

Mr. Short: I had nothing to do with the conference on 27th January. It was entirely a B.B.C. initiative. I do not know who was there, although I know that the Post Office was represented. As for contributions, I myself had discussions with a wide variety of organisations. I spent some weeks doing little else than interview people. Certainly half the House will be pleased to know that we have had a great many applications—far more than we need—all of whom are prepared to foot the bill and, in many cases, provide premises as well.

Mr. Mawby: As according to the Notice Paper today I appear to represent two constituencies, I assume that under the Prices and Incomes Act I should be justified in asking for a higher salary.
Is the right hon. Gentleman now saying that all the formal discussions have been with local authorities, as opposed to the suggestion in the White Paper that various bodies such as those referred to in my Question would be asked to contribute? Is he aware, further, that, while it may be a good idea to go round with the hat to raise money to pay for the village church bells, it is not an ideal way of paying for a local broadcasting system?

Mr. Short: That is a matter of opinion. I know that hon. Gentleman opposite do not want this to succeed but it will succeed and it will be a great success. As

I told the House in reply to a previous supplementary question, I interviewed a great many bodies of all kinds, and I saw, among others, the Archbishop of Canterbury. We have really talked to almost everyone concerned in the life of our communities.

Mr. Gilmour: It appears from the B.B.C.'s pamphlet that it shares the general scepticism about the right hon. Gentleman's local sources of revenue. Can the right hon. Gentleman say why the B.B.C. is so ill-informed about this?

Mr. Short: There is no scepticism on the part of the B.B.C. Yesterday, it showed me the applications that it has had. Let me repeat that a great many towns up and down the country have applied—far more than we need at this stage. In those cases, the whole cost will be forthcoming from the local community. I know that the hon. Gentleman does not want to see this, but that is the truth.

Mr. Berry: Would the Postmaster-General tell us which local chambers of trade and commerce have signified their willingness to make a financial contribution? If the list is too long, could he circulate it in the OFFICIAL REPORT.

Mr. Short: No, I cannot tell the hon. Gentleman this because I do not know yet which towns will be selected.

Mr. Crawshaw: Is my right hon. Friend aware that Liverpool and other Merseyside towns are prepared to go ahead with this scheme on the financial lines he has indicated and that this would bring the service to 1½ million people? Would my right hon. Friend bear in mind that, if Liverpool and that area were chosen, it would be but a fitting reward for the fact that over a number of years it has produced more stars for radio, screen, television, and what-have-you, than any other part of the country?

Dr. John Dunwoody: Would not my right hon. Friend agree that his announcement will be welcomed on this side of the House? Would he also not agree that there is a strong case for siting at least some of these experimental stations in areas which do not at present get full B.B.C. sound and television services, more especially as in those areas people pay the same licence fees?

Mr. Short: I do not think that my hon. Friend was present at yesterday's debate, but I said then that I hoped that one of these areas would include a district with a rural element in it.

Dr. Winstanley: To assist hon. Members to make up their minds on this very important issue, would the Postmaster-General arrange for hon. Members to hear the excellent experimental local radio programmes which have already been produced and recorded by the B.B.C.?

Mr. Short: These are available. I am sure that the B.B.C. would be pleased to allow hon. Members who have not heard them to hear them. We have advanced a good deal since then. I hope that the local radio stations will be a great deal in advance of that.

Mr. O'Malley: Do the capital costs which the Postmaster-General mentioned include provisions for studios from which there could be live musical performances? What proportion of running costs, in the Postmaster-General's estimate, would be for the cost of employing musicians in such live performances?

Mr. Short: I cannot say what proportion, but the White Paper says that we hope that there will be something in this for local musicians.

Mr. Speaker: Sir Ian Orr-Ewing.

Sir Ian Orr-Ewing: No. 18, Sir.

Mr. Speaker: I called the hon. Gentleman to ask a supplementary question.

Sir Ian Orr-Ewing: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I thought that if I tried for a supplementary you would then say, "Question No. 18", and that that would close the discussion on a very important issue. That is why I did not rise at that time.
Could the Postmaster-General tell the House why he felt that he could not allow even his choice of experimental stations to operate on the medium waves during daylight hours so that these would be available to existing listeners on ordinary medium-wave sets and also on car radios?

Mr. Short: I will not deal with car radios, because I dealt with these in an intervention last night. I am sure that

the right answer for the car radio is Radio 247.
The biggest thing against operating from medium waves would be that the system would have to be duplicated—on medium waves during daytime and on V.H.F. during night time. This would have been extremely wasteful. Apart from that, there would have been very great difficulties about finding medium wavelengths to do this.

Mr. John Lee: Is my right hon. Friend aware that even some of us who voted for the Bill last night, somewhat reluctantly in my own case, would take it ill if, after this experiment had been concluded, Auntie B.B.C. were to be continued in a monopoly position?

Mr. Short: Without agreeing with anything my hon. Friend said about the B.B.C., I must tell him that the White Paper makes it quite clear that we reserve our position at the end of the experiment. We are not in any way committed to the B.B.C.

Sir Harmar Nicholls: asked the Postmaster-General what proportion of the programmes to be broadcast by local radio stations will be locally produced material.

Mr. Edward Short: The B.B.C. expects that out of about 18 hours broadcasting time at least 4 to 5 hours will consist of locally produced material. There will also be additional hours devoted to locally produced educational and specialist programmes.

Sir Harmar Nicholls: The right hon. Gentleman says that the B.B.C. "expects". Will the Corporation lay down that at least this proportion of local affairs will be put over? Otherwise, it will not be a local broadcasting station.

Mr. Short: I think that the station manager and the local radio council will be expected to put out material from local sources for about one-third of their time.

Mr. O'Malley: Will my right hon. Friend define more closely what he means by locally produced material? Does it mean talk or music, or how would he split it up?

Mr. Short: I think that "locally produced material" is fairly explicit. It is material which is produced locally.

Mr. Bryan: Who will decide this sort of question? Will the Postmaster-General give guidance to the B.B.C. on it, or will the B.B.C. decide? Will there be a book of rules, as there is for the I.T.A., for instance, on codes of conduct and that sort of thing, and from where will such rules emanate?

Mr. Short: The station manager will have the final editorial decision, but he will have a working partnership with the local radio council.

Mr. Crouch: asked the Postmaster-General what he expects to learn from his proposed experiment in local sound radio.

Mr. Edward Short: I would refer the hon. Member to the White Paper; and, in particular, to paragraphs 36 and 41.

Colour Television

Sir Ian Orr-Ewing: asked the Postmaster-General whether, in view of the independent television programme companies' success in making and exporting colour programmes, he will reconsider his decision and allow them to be transmitted also for United Kingdom viewers.

Mr. Mawby: asked the Postmaster-General if he is aware that many foreigners are enjoying colour films made by British television companies; and when he will remove the restrictions that prevent their being seen by people in this country.

Mr. Short: I would refer the hon. Gentleman to my statement in the House yesterday morning.—[Vol. 741, c. 531.]

Sir Ian Orr-Ewing: I think that the House and the nation will be glad that the right hon. Gentleman was able to make a statement, but I hope that he will not think, because he has given permission for the independents now to spend £30 million on extending a colour service in the UHF area, that it has yet been achieved or that he has given anything gratis to the nation.

Mr. Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman must ask questions as other hon. Members do.

Sir Ian Orr-Ewing: Is the Postmaster-General aware of all that which I said in that supplementary question?

Mr. Short: This is a Government which gets things done.

Mr. Mawby: I think that the House as a whole will welcome the statement that the right hon. Gentleman made yesterday. Is he aware that speed is of the essence to ensure that the colour films which have been made over a long period of time by many of the contractors in this country and which at the moment are shown to foreigners will be able to be shown to British viewers at the earliest possible moment?

Mr. Short: Colour will start in the autumn of this year on B.B.C.2, and for a great part of the country on B.B.C.1 and I.T.V. in 1969.

Sir Harmar Nicholls: asked the Postmaster-General what estimates he has made of the extra revenue which will accrue to the British Broadcasting Corporation during 1967–68 as a result of the decision to charge a £5 licence fee for colour television; and what estimate he has made of the approximate cost to the British Broadcasting Corporation of providing a colour television service during the same period.

Mr. Short: As the service of colour television on B.B.C.2 will not start until late 1967, the revenue from the supplementary licence fees for colour television is unlikely to be significant during 1967–68, which is the year the hon. Gentle. man asked about. The B.B.C. tells me that its operating expenditure on colour television during that year will be about £500,000.

Sir Harmar Nicholls: Is the right hon. Gentleman satisfied that he has done his homework in this and that the cost will be covered within the range he has just announced? The Corporation has had enough years to arrive at it. It does not seem to be a satisfactory figure taking into account all that will be involved.

Mr. Short: I did not sav that the cost will be covered. I said that the B.B.C.'s costs would be about £500,000 in the year the hon. Gentleman asked about. Clearly, the income at the start will not be significant. It will build up as time passes, especially after the announcement I made yesterday.

Mr. Bryan: Would the Postmaster-General tell us as a matter of policy


whether the £5 licence for colour television is to be kept separate from the other licence? In other words, if it more than pays or less than nays, will it be altered? If it makes a profit, will it go into the general funds of the B.B.C.?

Mr. Short: It will go into the general funds of the B.B.C. where it will be kept separate. The two licences will be assessed separately. I will give no undertaking about it being altered one way or the other. As the hon. Member for Peterborough (Sir Harmar Nicholls) pointed out, we really do not know yet how this will work out.

Television (School Programmes)

Mr. Wall: asked the Postmaster-General if he will issue directions under the Licence and Agreement and the Television Acts to the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Independent Television Authority not to broadcast television programmes for schools on political matters unless they are both factual and balanced.

Mr. Joseph Slater: No, Sir. The broadcasting authorities are already under an obligation to treat controversial subjects with due impartiality.

Mr. Wall: Is the hon. Gentleman aware of the numerous complaints of bias and misrepresentation contained in a B.B.C. schools broadcast entitled, "Spotlight—The Choice for Rhodesia"? Will he agree that our children should not be brain-washed by the B.B.C., even if it is on the side of the Government, and will he look into this broadcast if I send him the script?

Mr. Slater: The hon. Gentleman has made his point. I can only say that it is for the governors of the B.B.C. and the members of the I.T.A. to interpret and apply the obligation to ensure impartiality.

Dr. Winstanley: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that many hon. Members would be much opposed to the Postmaster-General making any representations to these bodies on the political content of educational or any other programmes?

Mr. Mendelson: Does my hon. Friend further realise that the only complaints I have ever received about B.B.C. broadcasts to Rhodesia or about Rhodesia in

this country have been postmarked "Salisbury" and came from agents of Mr. Smith's régime?

Weather Conditions (Republic of Ireland)

Dame Joan Vickers: asked the Postmaster-General if he will consult the Government of Eire as to the possibility of the Meteorological Office making available to the British Broadcasting Corporation and independent television in future the weather conditions daily in Eire as is done for the British Isles.

Mr. Joseph Slater: No, Sir. This is a matter of programme content for which the broadcasting authorities are wholly responsible.

Dame Joan Vickers: That is a very disappointing reply. As we want better relations with the Government of Eire and the present Government are making it difficult for people to go overseas, will the hon. Gentleman realise that tourism in this country is essential and will he make further efforts, perhaps behind the scenes, to try to persuade them to have this programme?

Mr. Slater: Although I have some sympathy with the hon. Lady's view, I must inform her that it is for the broadcasting authorities to judge the need for broadcasting information even about the weather.

Licence Fees

Mr. Berry: asked the Postmaster-General what increase he envisages in the licence fees in 1968 and 1969.

Mr. Edward Short: No increase in the licence fees will be required before 1968. The timing of any increase will be a matter for the Government to decide in due course.

Mr. Berry: As the Postmaster-General failed to answer my Question No. 31 about financial contributions, and in view of the confusion of the Assistant Postmaster-General last night about who was to pay for the new B.B.C. experimental stations, can we be sure that by 1969 there will not be a much larger sum for the owners of sets to pay?

Mr. Short: For the first time, we have a pretty reasonable view of the B.B.C.'s


finances for some years ahead. I should make it clear that the major factor in the Corporation's difficulties arose because the 1962 White Paper laid on the B.B.C. a great many obligations to develop its services but the Government of the day were unwilling to face the financial consequences.

Walkie-talkie Sets

Mr. John Hall: asked the Postmaster-General what further action he has taken to discourage the sale of walkie-talkie sets for which licences are unlikely to be issued.

Mr. Edward Short: I have recently issued Press and broadcast notices to warn the public against buying the sets which the hon. Gentleman has in mind. I hope also in the near future to ask the House to give me powers to control the import of these sets.

Mr. Hall: Will the right hon. Gentleman take it that that reply gives great satisfaction and I am glad to know that he is taking responsibility for prohibiting the import of these sets?

Health Education

Dr. David Kerr: asked the Postmaster-General what progress has been made by the British Broadcasting Corporation and the independent television companies in appointing medical advisers to promote the development of health education for their staffs in accordance with the recommendations contained in the Report of Health Education by the Cohen Committee in 1964.

Mr. Joseph Slater: It is for the broadcasting organisations to decide what staff they should appoint. I suggest, therefore, that my hon. Friend should address his inquiry to the B.B.C. and the I.T.A.

Dr. Kerr: Many of us feel that great opportunities for health education are being lost as a result of this delay. Is there no way by which my hon. Friend could, in consultation with his right hon. Friend the Minister of Health, promote these and other schemes to improve health education through the services of the B.B.C. and I.T.A.?

Mr. Slater: I have already said in answer to previous Questions that pro-

grammes are a matter for the broadcasting authorities. One would expect them to be aware of the need to keep in touch with public policy on health education, and I have no doubt that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Health is quite up to date on this matter.

Radio Manx

Mr. Crouch: asked the Postmaster-General if he will seek to visit Radio Manx officially to see what lessons can be learnt from that experiment.

Mr. Edward Short: No, Sir. But I have had the benefit of a discussion with the chairman of Radio Manx, who came to see me.

Mr. Crouch: Does not the Postmaster-General consider that there is an excellent opportunity for examining how commercial radio can be run in the British Isles, and that here is a case of one being run in a licensed form? Does he not think that it should be closely examined, either by himself or by his senior officers?

Mr. Short: I do not know how many times I must say this, but I have examined the experiment of Radio Manx very carefully. I spent a whole afternoon with Mr. Mayer and I have his book, which I read with great care.

Mr. Bryan: Does the Postmaster-General appreciate that if he visited Radio Manx he would come to the conclusion that the lining up of nine B.B.C. stations to show their paces is not an experiment but a sham?

Mr. Short: Then the hon. Gentleman's visit to Radio 270 apparently explains his attitude towards the pirate radios.

Radio 247

Mr. Jopling: asked the Postmaster-General what proportion of the population will he able to receive Radio 247; and whether he is satisfied with the quality of the reception on the 247 metre wavelength.

Mr. Edward Short: The B.B.C. expects the popular music programme to be available to about 80 per cent. of the population by day, but to rather less after dark when, regrettably, interference from the continent becomes significant.

Mr. Jopling: Is the Postmaster-General aware that that waveband is also used by Radio Albania, which I understand causes considerable interference, particularly at night, and is he satisfied that that will not be serious?

Mr. Short: Radio Albania is becoming quite a serious matter. We are making all the representations we can to try to do something about it.

Oral Answers to Questions — NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY

Mr. Moonman: asked the Prime Minister if he will make a statement on Government policy in relation to the newspaper industry.

The Prime Minister (Mr. Harold Wilson): I would refer my hon. Friend to the speeches made by my right hon. Friends the Minister without Portfolio and the President of the Board of Trade in the debate on the Press on 8th February.—[Vol. 740, c. 1663 and c. 1776.]

Mr. Moonman: While I recognise the time allocated to the subject recently, has my right hon. Friend any formula for dealing with possible closures of national newspapers, and, if not, would he consider the matter with appropriate unions and managements?

The Prime Minister: It was explained by my right hon. Friends—and I took the same line in a speech at a Press luncheon earlier—that we feel that this is a matter for the responsible bodies in the newspaper industry themselves. If they have anything to report to us, any ideas they want us to consider, we shall consider them and discuss them with both sides.

Mr. Roebuck: Is my right hon. Friend aware that his hope that the newspaper proprietors will solve the present crisis is rather like hoping that the proprietors of the Maypole will help other people to open more shops? Will he consult the President of the Board of Trade with a view to setting up newspaper development areas and giving special tax allowances to would-be proprietors in one-newspaper towns to help break the increasing monopoly of the Press?

The Prime Minister: While not wanting to follow my hon. Friend round the Maypole, I think that his analogy is not exact because the problem we all face is

not creating new newspapers; it is, as my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay (Mr. Moonman) said, the problem and danger of existing newspapers closing down.

Oral Answers to Questions — HOUSING, SCOTLAND (MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY)

Mr. Edward M. Taylor: asked the Prime Minister if he will appoint a Minister with the exclusive task of dealing with the housing problem in Scotland.

The Prime Minister: No, Sir.

Mr. Taylor: Is the Prime Minister aware that after two years of the present set-up, completions in Scotland are still below the total for 1964, and that the records being broken are in gluts of bricks and redundancies of building workers? If he will not reallocate the jobs in the Scottish Office, will he reallocate the Ministers, and give us a Secretary of State who will fight for Scotland?

The Prime Minister: The extent to which my right hon. Friend has fought is shown by the fact that in the 2¼ years we have been in office, 82,289 houses were completed compared with 67,622 in the previous Administration's last 2¼ years.

Mr. Carmichael: May I press my right hon. Friend even more on this point? Does he realise that in Scotland, particularly in the Glasgow area, we have well over 100 years of neglect to overcome, and that there are special requirements to give the people decent housing accommodation?

The Prime Minister: Yes, Sir. I am sure that my hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Glasgow, Cathcart (Mr. M. Taylor) are only too aware of the gravity of the problem, which was recently highlighted again by the publication of a very new report. That is why special priority is being given to Scotland in the matter of housing.

Mr. Rippon: Will the Prime Minister agree that the poor rate of growth in housing, both in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom, is due to the failure of policies rather than shortage of Ministers, and is he aware that he already has the largest Government in


the world? Is he now satisfied that he requires no more Ministers in order to have a permanent majority of paid place-men in the Parliamentary Labour Party?

The Prime Minister: Now that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has had his fun, we might get back to the facts. Despite the big increase in our housing completions in Scotland, compared with those under the Government of which he was quite a senior member, we had to cope with a second problem—the fact that when that Government's election boom in Scottish housing was over there was a fall in public building starts from over 8,000 a quarter to only 5,000 a quarter in the third and fourth quarters of 1964; and there were only 4,000 approvals in the third quarter against averages of well over 8,000 before and since that time. We therefore had a double inheritance to deal with.

Mr. Woodburn: Is my right hon. Friend aware that this is a quite unjustifiable attack on the building trade employers and workers in Scotland, and that although they have not been able to reach the target set by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, they have nevertheless been able to increase and improve on last year's figures?

Oral Answers to Questions — LOWER-PAID WORKERS

Mr. Cronin: asked the Prime Minister if he will instruct the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Minister of Social Security to co-ordinate plans for fiscal and social measures to raise the standard of living of families dependent on lower-paid workers.

The Prime Minister: All aspects of this problem are already being considered by the Ministers concerned.

Mr. Cronin: While, in spite of the noncommittal nature of that reply, I am sure that effective measures will be taken, may I ask my right hon. Friend to make sure that there are no administrative delays? Will he bear in mind that some of us—and, I presume, the Government also—are not very proud of the fact that in this country there are still about 500.000 children living in a state of malnutrition, cold squalor and misery?

The Prime Minister: I am sure that the whole House is aware of and con-

cerned about this problem. As I said in a speech on the Beveridge Plan and as, indeed, we have all said recently, one of the major elements in poverty now, as it has been for some years, is the problem of lower-paid large families. My reply to my hon. Friend was noncommittal because the matter is being considered, and I assure him that it is being considered with very deep concern.
Some of the proposals put forward which appear to provide a relatively easy answer are not so simple as they look. That is why we must study them all very carefully.

Mr. Dean: May we have an assurance that in seeking ways of helping low-income families, the Government will not penalise other families through a reduction of the Income Tax child allowance?

The Prime Minister: At this stage of the year in relation to questions about Income Tax I could not in any way prejudge or anticipate the Budget statement of my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Oral Answers to Questions — WALES (PARLIAMENTARY QUESTIONS)

Mr. Anderson: asked the Prime Minister if he will instruct Ministers to ensure that Parliamentary Questions relating specifically and exclusively to Wales are always answered by the Secretary of State for Wales.

The Prime Minister: No, Sir, I think the present arrangements whereby Ministers normally answer Questions falling within their own field of responsibility best meet the convenience of the House.

Mr. Anderson: Is my right hon. Friend aware that the number of transferred Questions is now far too large? Would not the problem be obviated by giving the Secretary of State for Wales, who is doing a first-rate job, increased responsibility for matters like education, agriculture and health?

The Prime Minister: I agree with my hon. Friend's parenthetical reference to the Secretary of State for Wales. Some Questions are so marginal that it is difficult to judge whether they should be answered by the Welsh Office Minister


or by Ministers from the functional Departments concerned. However, a number of transfers take place because some hon. Members have put Questions down to the wrong Department in the first place.

Mr. Gwynfor Evans: Does not the Prime Minister appreciate that the right place to deal with matters relating specifically and exclusively to any nation—and Wales is no exception—is in a Parliament of the representatives of that nation, meeting on the soil of the homeland of that nation and responsible solely to the people of that nation?

The Prime Minister: I think that that is a somewhat wider question but, while the hon. Gentleman is awaiting the consummation of that particular desire, I have not noticed that he has been particularly backward about putting down Welsh Questions in this Parliament.

Oral Answers to Questions — UNEMPLOYMENT

Mr. Harold Walker: asked the Prime Minister which Minister is responsible for co-ordinating Government policy to ensure that unemployment does not reach or exceed that level which Her Majesty's Government have defined as being tolerable.

The Prime Minister: This question forms an important part of the wider field of general co-ordination of Government policy for which my right hon. Friends the First Secretary of State and the Chancellor of the Exchequer are responsible with the economic Ministers concerned.

Mr. Walker: Is my right hon. Friend aware that, to many of his supporters, the worst social crime of any Government is to deprive a man of the right to work? Is he further aware that 600,000 people are now deprived of the right to work? Will he initiate as quickly as possible the reflationary measures necessary to give them a chance to do a decent job?

The Prime Minister: My hon. Friend says that 600,000 people are deprived of the right to work but, as the House well knows, there is a certain irreducible minimum in any case, so that the figure is exaggerated. Following my statement of 20th July, I gave an estimate of what

it might well mean in terms of unemployment. It is now clear that the rise in unemployment has been and is levelling off and I see no reason to change the estimate and qualifications I made in July.

Sir C. Osborne: Will the Prime Minister also look at the problem of the 500,000 workers now on short time and the approximately 500,000 who previously worked overtime and have now lost it? These are two problems additional to that of the totally unemployed.

The Prime Minister: Yes, Sir, but I do not think that the hon. Gentleman is right in the numbers he has given, according to the latest published figures, of overtime as compared with those on short-time. I remind the House—and I know that he has pressed this many times—that if we had not taken the measures necessary to put the balance of payments right, the problem of unemployment would have been measured at a far higher figure than 600,000.

Mr. Mendelson: Will my right hon. Friend bear in mind that if the level of investment does not increase and the Government do not take appropriate measures very soon to increase and encourage further investment, there is real reason to fear that, by the end of this year, the level of unemployment will be as high as it is now, if not higher?

The Prime Minister: My hon. Friend will be aware of the measures taken since November by the Government to stimulate further investment by means of investment grants, with particular reference to development areas. I think that he will also agree that there is a fairly general impression that a lot of the gloom that was felt—genuinely felt—during the November period is now disappearing and is being replaced by a more optimistic feeling about employment and production, and this, of course, will have its effect both on investment and on unemployment.

Mr. Heath: Does the Prime Minister's Answer imply that we are now in the post-redeployment period? What is the evidence of redeployment in manufacturing industry since last July?

The Prime Minister: I do not imply that we are in the post-redeployment


period. In July, I said—as the right hon. Gentleman obviously recalls—that, after redeployment, the range of figures that I mentioned would not, I thought, be unacceptable to the country. The redeployment is not complete and the unemployment figures are, as I have said, now levelling off.

Oral Answers to Questions — PRIME MINISTER AND FOREIGN SECRETARY (VISIT TO BONN)

Mr. Wall: asked the Prime Minister if he will make a statement on his visit to Germany.

The Prime Minister: I was proposing to answer this Question at the end of Question Time, Mr. Speaker, but since it has been reached perhaps it might be convenient if I were to answer it now.

Hon. Members: No.

Mr. Younger: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Is it not the case that, if the right hon. Gentleman decides to answer this Question now, having previously arranged to answer it after Question Time, other questions to him will be cut out?

The Prime Minister: Further to that point of Order, Mr. Speaker. The hon. Gentleman is wasting his time. His facts are wrong. I arranged to answer Question No. Q7, if it was not reached, at the end of Question Time, with permission. If it is not convenient to the House for me to answer it now, I will go on to Question No. Q8, if it is called.

Oral Answers to Questions — GALLANTRY AWARDS

Mr. John Lee: asked the Prime Minister if he will recommend the creation of a new decoration for acts of gallantry by civilians to rank in between the George Cross and the George Medal; and if he will recommend that the award of the British Empire Order for such acts should be discontinued.

The Prime Minister: No, Sir. The George Cross and George Medal both rank above gallantry awards in the British Empire Order, and I see no sufficient grounds for thinking that awards in that Order should not continue to be made in recognition of less outstanding bravery.

Mr. Lee: While I do not pretend that this is a particularly important problem now, may I ask my right hon. Friend whether he does not agree that there is a slight anomaly in that, if one accepts that the George Cross is the civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross and the George Medal the equivalent of the Military Cross and the Military Medal, there is no equivalent to the Distinguished Service Order or the Distinguished Conduct Medal grade of gallantry in civilian awards?

The Prime Minister: I agree to some extent. This is a very difficult problem for everyone concerned with recommendations for awards, and there has recently been a tragic case which has given rise to my hon. Friend's Question. But we should be careful about suggesting the creation of new Orders, particularly of gallantry. It might cause further confusion and perhaps even some disparagement of the existing Orders.

Oral Answers to Questions — PRESIDENT JOHNSON (MEETING)

Mr. Marten: asked the Prime Minister when he next proposes to seek to meet the President of the United States of America.

The Prime Minister: I have no present plans for such a meeting, Sir.

Mr. Marten: Does the right hon. Gentleman recall that the electorate expect from him regular and routine summit meetings? It has been rather a long time since he has seen President Johnson. Some of his supporters would, I know, like him to do so. Will he not fix an early date?

The Prime Minister: It is some seven months since I saw the President, and that is about the average in the period since I came to office. I think that before that the average was about once a year, although there were variations between good years and bad. I will certainly inform the hon. Member as soon as anything is arranged.

Mr. Heffer: Will my right hon. Friend arrange an early meeting with the President and inform him of the deep feeling in this country, particularly in this party,


about the continuation of bombing of North Vietnam?

The Prime Minister: I dealt with this question on Tuesday. As my hon. Friend will realise, it is not necessary to arrange a specific face-to-face meeting for making any kind of representations to Mr. Johnson because we are in close and constant touch by other media.

Oral Answers to Questions — MINISTER OF LAND AND NATURAL RESOURCES

Mr. Boyd-Carpenter: asked the Prime Minister what functions are now being performed by the Minister of Land and Natural Resources; and what stage has been reached in the dissolution of this Department.

The Prime Minister: I will send the right hon. Gentleman a copy of The Ministry of Land and Natural Resources (Dissolution) Order, 1967, Sir.

Mr. Boyd-Carpenter: While thanking the Prime Minister for that habitually courteous reply, may I ask him whether the winding-up of this separate Department does not mean that he accepts that those of us who said that he was wrong to set up a separate Ministry of Land without planning powers have been shown to be right; and how much has this experiment cost the taxpayer?

The Prime Minister: If the right hon. Gentleman puts down a Question on the second part of his supplementary question, I will get him an answer. It does not prove what he thinks it proves, because during the period that this Ministry has been a separate Ministry it was possible for a senior Minister to concentrate on such valuable Measures as the Land Commission Bill. My right hon. Friend has also been very much concerned with the Bill on leasehold. The mere fact that the right hon. Gentleman considers that to be legalised robbery does not reflect the views of this side of the House or the House as a whole or, I believe, the one million leaseholders affected by it.

Mr. Rippon: Can the Prime Minister say what will happen to the Ministers concerned when their Department is dissolved, and why it is necessary for a Labour Government to have four times

as many Ministers for housing and land matters as the Conservative Government?

The Prime Minister: As I informed the House many months ago, the Ministers concerned will be assimilated into the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. I have already given some reasons this afternoon in respect of Scotland, for example, why we have had a much heavier load and have had to catch up with some of the things which the Conservatives left us with. I do not think that the figures which I gave were contested even by the right hon. Gentleman.

PRIME MINISTER AND FOREIGN SECRETARY (VISIT TO BONN)

The Prime Minister: With permission, Mr. Speaker, I should now like to answer Question Q7.
My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary and I visited Bonn from 14th to 16th February for talks with the Federal German Chancellor and Foreign Minister. As in the other capitals we have already visited, our discussions covered a range of questions arising in the context of eventual British membership of the European Economic Community. They included such matters as our attitude to the Treaty of Rome, problems arising from the Community's agricultural policy and its policies on freedom of capital movements, and other general economic and financial questions.
We are most grateful to the German Ministers for the friendly and constructive spirit in which they approached these discussions, which enable us to explore with them in some depth the main problems which would need to be faced in any eventual negotiations. Our discussions confirmed the identity of view demonstrated by prompt and friendly reaction of the German Government to my statement of 10th November.

Mr. Wall: I thank the Prime Minister for his courtesy in informing me that he would answer this Question after Question Time. Did he receive an assurance from the German Government that they would back our entry into the Common Market even if this arouses a certain amount of difficulty with France? I also want to ask about the question of offset costs. Will the Germans continue


to honour the present agreement, which, I understand, ends in April, and were there any discussions about what will happen after that?

The Prime Minister: On the first part of the hon. Gentleman's supplementary question, all our talks fully justified our feelings about the Germans' attitude as expressed in their public statements welcoming our initiative. As to what they may say in conversations with Heads of Government of other countries of the Six, this must be a matter for those holding these conversations. It is not for me to speculate about them in public.
On the question of offset costs, our visit was principally about the Common Market, but we took the advantage of one or two short private meetings to discuss matters of more bilateral interest. We understand their difficulties about offset costs and they understand ours. This is being dealt with by tripartite machinery, as the House knows. We felt that it was best left there.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: As many people in this country argue that entry to the Common Market is a solution of our economic troubles, did the Prime Minister make any inquiries as to why there were 650,000 unemployed in Germany and why it is also in budgetary difficulties?

The Prime Minister: No, I did not make any such inquiries during my visit. I would not take the view—and I do not know whether many people do—that entering the Common Market provides a solution of our economic difficulties. They will be solved, inside or outside the Common Market, only by our own efforts and policies. I gave strong reasons in the debate, as have other right hon. and hon. Members. why entry on the right conditions would help us to make those efforts more effective. But we shall not solve any problems just by being in or just by staying out.

Sir Knox Cunningham: Did the Prime Minister give the same information to the authorities in Bonn yesterday that his right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade was giving to his own party here?

The Prime Minister: As the hon. and learned Gentleman knows, 1 have only just returned from Bonn. I was not

present at the meeting last night. I do not know whether the hon. and learned Gentleman was; he seems to know all about it.

Sir Knox Cunningham: In spirit.

The Prime Minister: The hon. and learned Gentleman may have been there in spirit. It is a very strange spirit for us to have at a Labour Party meeting. Nevertheless, 1 have read Press reports. I shall inform myself better on this question. But I have been trained, from painful experience over long years, not always to believe every word of what I read in the Press—even accounts of private meetings.

Mr. Park: Did the Prime Minister make it clear in his discussions that we have no intention of pandering to West German demands for the possession of or a share in the control of nuclear weapons? Did he make it clear that Her Majesty's Government will continue to use every effort to secure the early signature of a non-proliferation treaty?

The Prime Minister: My hon. Friend can rest assured that I received no such demands, and I am not aware of any demands on the part of the West German Government to that effect. Therefore, in that respect, there was nothing to pander to. With regard to the nonproliferation treaty, certainly in every meeting—it was true last week, it is true this week—we have continued to urge the necessity and urgency of a quick signature of such a treaty on which so much progress has recently been made.

Mr. Heath: Did the Prime Minister explain to the Federal Government what the Foreign Secretary meant when he told a Press conference that the Anglo-Soviet communiqué implied recognition, in a way, of the Oder-Neisse line?

The Prime Minister: The extraordinary thing is that the Federal German Chancellor seemed much less interested in this question than the right hon. Gentleman. He did not, in fact, raise it with me. My right hon. Friend, in discussions with the Foreign Minister, dealt with the situation. I should have been prepared to do so. But the German Government know perfectly well that nothing has changed in our policy on any of these matters.

Mr. Heath: Would the right hon. Gentleman tell the House what the Foreign Secretary meant by this sentence?

The Prime Minister: I was present at this Press conference. I was in no doubt about what he meant. My right hon. Friend went on to say that the reference in the communiqué to countries—this was the basis of the question—was a question of definition of countries, and we regard Germany, all of Germany, as a country. This is our position, and my right hon. Friend made this very clear.
As we have always said, and as the right hon. Gentleman said, the question of the definition of frontiers is for the ultimate peace conference. What my right hon. Friend was urging, and continues to urge, is the. need for and the creation of the conditions so that we can get quickly to that conference when these things will be in order.

Mr. Heath: The Prime Minister has told the House what the Foreign Secretary said, which was reported in the Press. The Foreign Secretary was then asked:
Yes, but does that statement imply recognition of the Oder-Neisse line?",
to which he replied:
Yes, in a way.
What did he mean?

Mr. George Brown: The right hon. Gentleman has got it wrong.

The Prime Minister: As I say, I was there, and as it was not possible to ask the right hon. Gentleman, I should be happy to send him a verbatim transcript unless, as I suspect, he has already got one. If he will read the one he has got, or may have, he will find that he has reversed the questions and answers. As I have explained clearly, my right hon. Friend said that in answer to the previous question which was not very clearly formulated and then went on with the detailed explanation. It was in that order.

Mr. Frank Allaun: Tripartite talks or not, did not the Prime Minister refer to the flat refusal of the German Finance Minister to cover our offset costs? In view of the terrible effect that this is having in Britain, with the deflationary measures and the 600,000 unemployed, surely this is a matter worthy of more important discussion?

The Prime Minister: My hon. Friend can be quite content that the German Government are in no doubt whatever about our position on this. They were in no doubt before we went, and they are in no doubt now.

Mr. James Davidson: Can the Prime Minister inform the House whether there was any discussion of the possible establishment of a reserve currency?

The Prime Minister: A European reserve currency—no, there was no discussion.

Mr. Hooley: Was my right hon. Friend able to discuss with the Federal Government the question of trade and other financial dealings between West Germany and Rhodesia?

The Prime Minister: No, Sir, it was not necessary on this occasion. There have, of course, been continuing contacts between ourselves and Germany on this matter, and Germany is taking action. I had better not go further into the question of the remaining difficulties.

Captain W. Elliot: Is the Prime Minister aware that after his discussions in the various capitals about the Common Market he has given the House extraordinarily little information? There may be good reasons for this, but is the Prime Minister aware that when the talks are completed it will not be enough to come to the House and say that the conditions are such that we cannot apply or that they are such that we can? What is his intention for the future? Will he issue a detailed White Paper of all the discussions so that we can judge for ourselves?

The Prime Minister: I do not know in what part of the world the hon. and gallant Member has been travelling, because after each of the visits I have made a short statement and after the third visit, which was the halfway stage, I made a much longer statement and answered a large number of questions, including the exact one put by the hon. and gallant Member.

Mr. Brooks: Would not my right hon. Friend accept that, whatever interpretation might be placed upon the recent statement by the Foreign Secretary, this would be an opportune moment to clarify to the West German Government that the British Government do not regard


as a condition of entry to the European Economic Community any argument in favour of a revision of the Oder-Neisse frontier?

The Prime Minister: I have said that this matter was not discussed in my talks during the past week with the Chancellor. Of course, this is a separate question. It is an important question. It has nothing at all to do with the question of the conditions on which Britain should, if we can, adhere to the Common Market. There were some bilateral questions which had nothing to do with it which we found time to discuss, but this was not one of them.

Mr. Drayson: Further to the Prime Minister's reference to a peace conference, would he not agree that before this can take place there must be a meeting of the signatories of the Potsdam Agreement to settle the outstanding aspects of that agreement which have not yet been fulfilled?

The Prime Minister: I think that the hon. Member misunderstood me. There is a reference in the Anglo-Soviet communiqué to a peace conference and the word "countries" comes in that reference. The particular question to which my right hon. Friend was replying was another reference to countries at the foot of page 1 of that communiqué. It did not relate to a peace conference.
Since the hon. Member has referred to the question of a peace conference, may I say that we have stressed in the communiqué the need for adequate preparation. We did not say that it means a meeting between two blocs.

Mr. Alfred Morris: From his experience of the talks so far, having visited four European capitals, can my right hon. Friend say whether he is encouraged to feel that any negotiations with the Six may be worthwhile?

The Prime Minister: This will be a matter for us to consider when we have completed the six visits. After that, we shall have to consider the position and what our next step should be. As I say, no decision at all has yet been taken on the definitive question. It will not be taken until the six visits are over. As soon as we have a decision to com-

municate, of course it will be made in the House.

Mr. Jennings: In his recent visits to Europe, how far has the Prime Minister discussed the political and constitutional consequences of our signing the Treaty of Rome, and with what results?

The Prime Minister: If the hon. Member is referring to the internal constitutional questions——

Mr. Jennings: I mean for ourselves.

The Prime Minister: —for this country——

Mr. Jennings: Yes.

The Prime Minister: —and not the question of constitutional matters within Europe, this has not been discussed at all on our visits; but my right hon. Friend and I referred to this question in some detail in the debate on the Common Market last November.

Mr. Rankin: As a result of his visit, is my right hon. Friend optimistic that if in time an application comes to be made to enter the Common Market, Germany will support it?

The Prime Minister: It is too early to express a general view importing optimism, pessimism or anything else, but I am in no doubt whatever from the talks which we have had this week that the German Government have fully supported and amplified to us in our private discussions the very strong promise of support for our entry which they made publicly within a few hours of our own statement on 10th November.

Mr. Kirk: Has the Prime Minister seen the almost unanimous Press reports from Bonn suggesting, rather depressingly, that the German Government are advising delay? While accepting the right hon. Gentleman's wariness about Press reports generally, may I ask whether he would care to comment on this?

The Prime Minister: Yes, Sir. I was not at the receiving end of any advice of delay. I have read the Press reports. I have found them, as the hon. Gentleman has said, more depressing than were the actual talks. There has been a great deal of speculation in the Press about the


anxiety in Germany concerning nonproliferation as though that might affect the question of entry. I assure him that it is not in any way connected, either intrinsically or in the mind of the German Government, with the question of entry. Indeed, any anxieties which they may have about freedom to develop the peaceful use of atomic energy could be assuaged by the much greater cooperation which we could offer if we were members of Euratom or any successor body to it.

Mr. Mendelson: With reference to the treaty of nuclear non-proliferation, to the preparation of which several members of Her Majesty's Government have made such a considerable contribution, has my right hon. Friend's attention been drawn to a recent lecture by Professor Greve, the official representative of the West German Government in the N.A.T.O. Council, opposing the treaty and pointing to the dangers from the German point of view in supporting it? That is an official point of view. What is my right hon. Friend's comment on that?

The Prime Minister: I certainly found time on this occasion to discuss this question. We stated our position and our interpretation of the respective points on this in, as it happens, exactly the same words as we used a week earlier in our discussions with Mr. Kosygin. Our own position on this is absolutely clear. As I have said, the German Government have some anxieties, not on the question of military use, but on the danger that civil atomic energy development might be affected. We have, I think, gone a considerable way to reassure them on this, but we have plans for further technical talks, so that some of their anxieties can be wholly disposed of.

Mr. Blaker: If, as the Prime Minister has said, the Federal German Chancellor showed no interest whatever in the views of the Foreign Secretary on the Oder-Neisse line, is not that an interesting pointer to the lack of importance which the world attaches to the Foreign Secretary.

The Prime Minister: That question is about up to the level of the average question that we have had from the hon. Member ever since he came into this

House. The real answer, I think, is that the Federal German Chancellor was not going to be driven into a great Press tizzy about this because he knew the policy of Her Majesty's Government as stated repeatedly by my right hon. Friend and myself.

Several Hon. Members: rose——

Mr. Speaker: Order. We must proceed.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE

Mr. Heath: Can the Leader of the House kindly state the business for next week?

The Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. Richard Crossman): Yes, Sir.

The business for next week will be as follows:

MONDAY, 20TI I FEBRUARY: In the morning—
Diplomatic Privileges (Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies) (Amendment) Order.

In the afternoon—

Remaining stages of the Road Safety Bill, of the Road Traffic Bill and of the Misrepresentation Bill [Lords].

TUESDAY, 21ST FEBRUARY: Remaining stages of the Housing (Financial Provisions, &c.) (Scotland) Bill.

Rate Support Grant (Scotland) Order and the Exchequer Equalisation Grant (Notional Rent Income) (Scotland) Order.

WEDNESDAY, 22ND FEBRUARY: In the morning—

Second Reading of the General Rate Bill [Lords], which is a Consolidation Measure.

In the afternoon—

Debate on a Motion to approve the White Paper on Transport Policy (Command No. 3057).

Remaining stages of the Post Office (Borrowing Powers) Bill, and of the Plant Health Bill [Lords] and the Forestry Bill [Lords], which are Consolidation Measures.

THURSDAY, 23RD FEBRUARY: Supply [9th Allotted Day]:

Debate on the increase in fees to be charged to overseas students, on an Opposition Motion.

As Seven o'clock, as the House is aware, the Chairman of Ways and Means has set down Opposed Private Business for consideration.

FRIDAY, 24TH FEBRUARY: Private Members' Motions.

MONDAY, 27TH FEBRUARY: The business proposed:

In the morning—

Opposition and other Prayers.

In the afternoon—

A Motion to approve the White Paper on Defence, which will be concluded on Tuesday, 28th February.

Mr. Heath: Could the Leader of the House renew his undertaking that, in the unfortunate event of negotiations with Malta breaking down, he would be prepared to reorganise business for next week in order for us to have a debate on that question? Will he take note that the House would be grateful if his right hon. Friend in charge of Commonwealth relations could make a statement at an early date?

Mr. Crossman: I renew the statement I made last week and would make every effort for that to be done. As to a statement being made by my right hon. Friend, 1 will communicate that suggestion to him and, if necessary, he will give one to the House.

Mr. Heffer: In view of the fact that over 100 hon. Members have now signed Motion 408 on the question of Vietnam, and in view of the deep feeling which exists on this question, will my right hon. Friend this week give us an assurance that we shall have an early debate; in fact rearrange the business so that we can have a debate on this very important problem within the coming week?

[That this House condemns the renewed United States bombing of North Vietnam, which so flagrantly undermines the peace initiatives of U Thant, the United Nations Secretary-General; and calls upon the Government unequivocally to dissociate the United Kingdom from this action.]

Mr. Crossman: I cannot add anything further to what I said last week. In the near future we shall have the Defence Estimates coming up and we have very little Government time. Time for general debates must be found by the Opposition.

Mr. Hugh Fraser: Does not the right hon. Gentleman consider, having looked at the Vote on Account, showing that Government expenditure has gone up 8·5 per cent. and production by only 1 per cent., that this should be the subject of a debate in the House of Commons?

Mr. Crossman: That is a matter which no doubt we shall debate in due course. It is certainly something which the Opposition could consider for a Supply Day.

Sir G. de Freitas: In view of the increasing interest in the work of the Council of Europe, will the Leader of the House consider following the example of all, or nearly all, the other 17 members of the Council and provide time for a debate on the Council of Europe?

Mr. Crossman: Yes, I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. I am aware of the increasing interest and, through the usual channels, I will discuss the possibility of having such a debate, but not, I am afraid, in the near future.

Mr. Heath: In regard to the right hon. Gentleman's reply about a debate on the Estimates, does he recall that it is the custom of the Government to provide time for an economic debate before the Budget and it is not the job of the Opposition to offer a Supply Day for it? There has been a vast, indeed, a flabbergasting, increase in Government expenditure, and this needs to be debated urgently.

Mr. Crossman: I shall certainly pay regard to that.

Mr. Winnick: Since the Opposition could not care tuppence about the war in Vietnam—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."]—could the Leader of the Opposition—

Mr. Speaker: Order. The hon. Member cannot ask questions of the Leader of the Opposition during business time.

Mr. Winnick: May I ask my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House whether he will provide for a debate on Vietnam within the next fortnight, (a) because of


the situation there, and (b) because of the support shown of the Motion on the Order Paper?

Mr. Crossman: I am aware of the support shown for this Motion, but I repeat what 1 said last week. In the view of the Government, unless there is a substantial change in the situation, a debate in the near future is not justified.

Mr. Sandys: Will the Leader of the House provide time to debate Motion No. 413 in my name:

[That this House deplores the refusal of the Chancellor of the Exchequer on 13th December, 1966 to give any estimate of the effect of sanctions against Rhodesia upon Great Britain's balance of payments, and the refusal of the Minister of State for Commonwealth Affairs to deny or confirm an estimate put to him at Question Time on 14th February, 1967; requests the Government to make available to the House the text of the Prime Minister's detailed statement to the Commonwealth Prime Minister's Conference, contained in a document, entitled Annex to CPM(66/2) 2nd Meeting, 6th September, 1966, in which he estimates that the cost to Great Britain's balance of payments up to the end of 1966, together with the special aid given or offered to Zambia, would amount to about £100 million; and calls upon the Prime Minister to explain why information on this important matter is being withheld from Parliament.]

This calls on the Prime Minister to explain why he has withheld from the House information about the cost of sanctions which he has been able to give to other Commonwealth Governments. If the right hon. Gentleman is not able to find time for an early debate, will he assure us that the Prime Minister will make a full statement next week about this matter, because the House has been disgracefully treated?

Mr. Speaker: Order. We cannot argue on a business question.

Mr. Crossman: I think there might have been an opportunity at Question Time this afternoon for the Prime Minister to refer to this, but unfortunately it was omitted because the Question was not asked. I shall bring it to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Prime

Minister. If the right hon. Gentleman could persuade his colleagues to change the subject for debate on a Supply Day next week, this possibly could be the topic.

Mrs. Anne Kerr: Does not the Leader of the House accept that the resumption of bombing by the United States on North Vietnam in fact constitutes a change in policy? As there is very widespread discontent throughout Britain and in the House of Commons at the fact that U Thant's appeal and the Pope's appeal have been completely thrown aside, does not my right hon. Friend agree that there should be a speedy acceptance of the plea for a debate on Vietnam in this House?

Mr. Crossman: No. I do not agree with my hon. Friend on this. The Prime Minister made a full statement on his talks with the Russian Prime Minister. We are all disappointed that opportunities for peace which seemed to be coming did not come, but I should have thought that there was not a new situation justifying a debate.

Mr. G. Campbell: On Motion No. 365, the Leader of the House said last week that he would convey to the Secretary of State for Scotland the wish for a statement about the anomalous situation concerning the pay award to Scottish local government employees.

[That this House deplores the arbitrary application of the Government's economic policy, resulting in the rejection of a pay rise for local government employees in Scotland which has been granted to equivalent staff in England and Wales: and calls upon Her Majesty's Government to rectify this anomaly.]

Will the right hon. Gentleman be making a statement on this next week?

Mr. Crossman: I think I am right in saying that my right hon. Friend answered two Questions on this matter. I do not think he has anything to add to what he said in those Answers on 2nd February.

Mr. Philip Noel-Baker: Will my right hon. Friend reconsider the words he used about yet another debate and about the impossibility of having a debate unless the Opposition find time for it? It is some months since we debated Vietnam


and the Prime Minister constantly says this is the most important question in the world. Is the share of the House of Commons in the conduct and formulation of foreign affairs to be reduced to zero?

Mr. Crossman: I would, of course, always listen with the greatest respect to my right hon. Friend in his views on foreign affairs, but the last time we debated Vietnam was on the Adjournment before Christmas when some of my hon. Friends quite rightly spoke at some considerable length on it. The question is whether we should have another debate in this period when we are putting forward the Defence Estimates and there is a great block of work to be done. I should have thought there would be opportunities during the two days on defence and the three days on the Service Estimates for this subject to be raised by my hon. Friends. What I said was that the Government could not find special time for a debate on this subject in the near future.

Mr. Heath: May I return to the question raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr. Sandys)? Is this not a matter of the utmost public importance? Whatever view hon. and right hon. Members take about the policies to be pursued towards Rhodesia, ought not the House to be given the facts? As the Chancellor of the Exchequer says he is unable to give the facts and it is known that these facts were given to the members of the Commonwealth, will the Leader of the House give a firm undertaking now that either the Prime Minister or the Chancellor of the Exchequer will give the House of Commons the same information as was given to the Commonwealth?

Mr. Crossman: I am certainly prepared to convey to the Prime Minister the wish of the Leader of the Opposition for a statement next week on this subject.

Mr. Dickens: May I press my right hon. Friend further on the question of an early debate on Vietnam? Is he aware that the terms of Motion No. 408, which stands in my name and the names of 103 of my hon. Friends, is an emphatic repudiation of the Government's policy over Vietnam? Is my right hon. Friend fur-

ther aware that this House has not debated Vietnam for eight months'? Will he arrange for a debate in the next week or so on this very vital matter'?

Mr. Crossman: I should not have thought that the description my hon. Friend gave entirely incorporated the views of the other 100 or more who signed the Motion.

Mr. Clark Hutchison: Is it the view of the Government continually to block the Livestock Control Bill, yes or no?

Mr. Crossman: The hon. Member knows very well the practice on Fridays with such Bills. The fact that a Bill is blocked does not mean that the Government oppose the Measure or are concerned at all. This is a normal practice on Fridays. What it means is that time is not likely to be found for the Bill.

Mr. Mayhew: Is my right hon. Friend aware that, in accordance with the normal practice, the Defence White Paper was made available to the Press this morning but it was not available to Members of Parliament until 2.30 this afternoon? Will he look again at this practice? Is he aware that at a luncheon of the Foreign Press Association in the House of Commons today hon. Members interested in this matter had to learn the defence policy of the Government from a friendly journalist from a Communist country? If an hon. Member undertakes to observe the embargo on publication, why should he not be trusted with the Defence White Paper as much as a Communist journalist?

Mr. Crossman: I am obliged to my hon. Friend for raising this matter in a very good-humoured way. When I was both a journalist and back-bench Member of Parliament I used to have a similar frustration in thinking that I was trusted less as an M.P. than as a journalist with regard to the pre-release of reports. I am prepared to look into this, but great problems are involved in giving precisely the same concession to back-bench Members of Parliament as are given to journalists, who are under a pledge of secrecy before a statement is made.

Sir R. Cary: May I thank the Leader of the House for so promptly providing time for a debate on transport on Wednesday next? If that debate indicates future legislation. could it be preceded by an


explanatory White Paper, before the Bill is published? Dividing the country into new transport conurbations may be a new form of public ownership or control. Surely, therefore, the House would be more entitled to a better explanation than could come from the generalities of a Second Reading debate?

Mr. Crossman: I thank the hon. Member for what he has said. I cannot anticipate what my right hon. Friend will say in the debate, but I can guess that further legislation will possibly be suggested.

Sir Harmar Nicholls: On a point of order. Have not hon. Members been impugned considerably by the statement of the Leader of the House that journalists from Communist countries can be trusted with information that hon. Members cannot be trusted with?

Mr. Crossman: If in any way I did suggest such a thing, that was not my intention. I intended to point out that this is an old problem—that the Press are given some hours to prepare their reports before publication—which is usually in the afternoon in this House—at a certain time in the Vote Office. This is an old problem. I am willing to have it considered again. We might discuss it through the usual channels, since this is a source of irritation for all hon. Members who are concerned when talking with the Press at luncheons. It is ignominious to find that the Press knows something and one does not. I said that there was often a problem in trying to reconcile different interests.

Mr. Speaker: There is no point of order involved in the statement of the hon. Member for Peterborough (Sir Harmar Nicholls), as far as the Chair is concerned.

Mr. Lubbock: Is the Leader of the House aware that back benchers are in some difficulty, in regard to morning sittings, in knowing whether a Statutory Instrument will be taken in the morning or the evening? Is he further aware that it would be of great assistance if a notice were to appear on the Order Paper every time a Statutory Instrument is tabled saying whether it will be taken before lunch or after Ten o'clock in the evening?

Mr. Crossman: I appreciate that this is a problem, and I have been considering how best to deal with it. Normally we do not put the Orders down as part of our business, because Prayers are moved by the Opposition. This is a legitimate problem, especially for back benchers who want to know in advance when an Order will be discussed. I am willing to discuss this matter through the usual channels.

Mr. Hugh Jenkins: Will my right hon. Friend take seriously the question of information to Members of Parliament? It was very embarrassing to be asked by correspondents from Bulgaria, Holland and Japan what the defence policy of Her Majesty's Government was and have to say that I did not know. Will he therefore look into this matter, not complacently, but with a view to changing the situation so as to put backbench Members of Parliament at least on the level of journalists?

Mr. Crossman: I am glad that my hon. Friend has complete confidence that when he studies the Defence Estimates he will know all about defence. I will consider this problem, but I cannot add to what I have said already.

Mr. Younger: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that his refusal to grant a debate on the failure to give local authority officers in Scotland the rise in pay to which they are entitled will cause widespread dismay throughout Scotland? Has he been informed that opposition to this policy spreads right across the parties and includes many of his hon. Friends? Will he therefore give us a debate?

Mr. Crossman: I have been informed of the interest in this subject in Scotland, and I will communicate the views of the hon. Member to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland.

Mr. Michael Foot: Will my right hon. Friend consider the extremely unsatisfactory position that arises from his answers in response to requests for a debate about Vietnam? Does he seriously suggest that we could debate this matter generally and fully during the course of the defence debates? If so, we shall need to take such steps as we can to ensure that we get much more time for the Defence debates. We shall have


to insist upon it. Does he think it satisfactory that we were last able to debate the matter on the Adjournment, when there are some restrictions? Will he finally reconsider his statement that he thinks that possibly some of those who signed Motion No. 100 may have qualifications about it? If he does so, that is all the more reason for having a debate. Will not he consider the fact that there is a widespread demand from almost every back-bencher on this side of the House for an early debate on this matter, because we disagree with the Government's statement of the way in which the settlement which was so near was eventually ruptured? Can we have a debate?

Mr. Crossman: I will bring these matters to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, who, no doubt, will consider them. I will consult him on the question whether the situation justifies a debate. All that I said was that I thought it unlikely that we should be able to find time during the immediate future, when defence is debated. I did not suggest to my hon. Friend—it would not be for me, but for you, Mr. Speaker—that we would find time for a debate on Vietnam; I said that opportunities would arise on which this subject might well be raised.

Mr. Kershaw: The Leader of the House will be aware that there has not been time to debate the Prayer on the Gloucester Order. Is he able to hold out any hopes that time can be found for a Motion on the subject during next week?

Mr. Crossman: The Gloucester Order is on our list and will come forward in due course.

Mr. Raphael Tuck: My right hon. Friend has said that there was no new situation in Vietnam. Previously he said that if there were a substantial change in the situation he would consider a debate. Does not he consider that the renewal of the bombing of North Vietnam constitutes such a substantial change?

Mr. Crossman: I appreciate that my hon. Friend thinks that. I believe that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary appreciate that he thinks that. We differ on the degree of substantiality.

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that his answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Ayr (Mr. Younger) on the question of pay to local authority officers in Scotland is totally inadequate? As he knows, the same answer was given last week, and it caught us unaware. If the Secretary of State for Scotland is too ashamed to make a statement to the House on this matter, will the right hon. Gentleman suggest inviting the First Secretary to do so instead?

Mr. Crossman: I suggest that the idea that my right hon. Friend is ashamed of discussing anything with the hon. Member is a gross maligning of his reputation as a debater. Scottish matters are being discussed next week—I believe on Tuesday.

Mr. Frederic Harris: In view of the farce of the attendance on Monday mornings, such as last Monday, when there was hardly a back-bencher of the Socialist party present, is it worth while going ahead next Monday morning with similar business?

Mr. Crossman: There is a misunderstanding by those who were not present during the procedural debate on morning sittings. It was made quite clear that we would be discussing less important business in the mornings than we usually did in the afternoons. I still maintain that the number of hon. Members from the Opposition who attend in the hours of the morning sittings is not markedly smaller than the number who attend similar debates at One o'clock in the morning.

Mr. S. C. Silkin: In view of the Prime Minister's reference in his recent Swansea speech to the proposed leasehold legislation, is my right hon. Friend now in a position to say when this long-awaited Bill will be published, and when it will be debated?

Mr. Crossman: Speaking with my usual caution, I think that the question of leasehold will be debated before Easter.

Sir H. Harrison: May I refer the right hon. Gentleman to the extraordinary reply he made to my hon. Friend's question about blocking the Livestock Export Control Bill. One reason why he said it has been blocked was that the Government would not want to give it time. I


remind him that it is a Private Members' Bill and that if it is not blocked it has to take its normal place in private Members' allotted time.

Mr. Crossman: I have nothing to add to what I have said. The practice observed was the normal practice when Bills are blocked. No one can control the right of individual Members to block a Bill.

Mr. E. L. Mallalieu: Has my right hon. Friend noticed Motion No. 415 on the Paper, dealing with the Defence of Peace in the Minds of Men—

[That this House, noting that 20 years have now elapsed since the foundation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation and noting the increased nationalism and rising tensions throughout the world which have occurred in the absence of any significant action by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation to encourage a sense of world community, calls upon Her Majesty's Government to propose at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation a programme to encourage a dual perspective in education, world as well as national, so that opportunity is given in the curriculum for balancing national loyalty with a measure of conscious loyalty to the human race as a whole in all its diversity.]

—under the names of the right hon. Members for Birmingham, Handsworth (Sir E. Boyle) and 85 other Members, and will he state when we may have a debate on it?

Mr. Crossman: I am aware of this Motion, which raises an extremely important subject, but again I must say to my hon. Friend that I do not see any chance in the immediate future of the Government giving time for what I agree is an extremely important matter.

Mr. Hastings: In addition to the extraordinary lack of frankness about the cost of sanctions, referred to by my hon. Friend, is the Leader of the House aware of the speech which the Commonwealth Secretary is reported to have made in New Zealand yesterday in which he clearly implied that in the event of sanctions failing the Government would consider the use of force despite the blood-

shed and misery which this would bring? Is not this a radical change of policy? Will the right hon. Gentleman ask the Prime Minister to deal with this also when he makes his statement?

Mr. Crossman: Again I say to the hon. Gentleman that if the Opposition wish to censure us once again about our Rhodesian policy, either in the past or in the present, they must find their own opportunity for doing so. I promised that I would put to the Prime Minister the need for a statement. I shall not go further than that.

Mr. Ridsdale: May I ask the Leader of the House whether his attention has been drawn to Motion No. 414:

[That this House, noting that the Government already has more Ministers more highly paid than at any other time in history, censures Her Majesty's Government for sanctioning an additional increase in salary for one of their Ministers from £72 a week to £108 a week at the same time as they appeal to lower paid workers for severe wage restraint.]

May I point out how difficult it is going to be to explain this breaking of the wage freeze by the Government?

Mr. Speaker: Order. We cannot argue merits on business question time. The hon. Member can ask for time to debate this.

Mr. Crossman: I think I am right in saying that this Motion appeared only today. I will certainly draw it to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, and I think that he will probably be only too anxious to reply to it.

Viscount Lambton: Will the right hon. Gentleman ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food to make a statement on foot-and-mouth disease? More than a month ago he said that he would make a statement. Week follows week with assurances but no statement. Surely this must come to an end?

Mr. Crossman: I do not think that there has been undue delay on this. As I said last week, this is a subject of great importance on which a very precise analysis is needed. I think that my right hon. Friend will make the statement next Wednesday morning.

Mr. McMaster: In view of the intolerable and rising rate of unemployment in the economically weaker parts of the United Kingdom, and particularly in Northern Ireland, will the Leader of the House provide an early day to debate the Government's failure in this field?

Mr. Crossman: I think that my answer to even more important topics is to say that we have not time for this in the near future.

Mr. MacArthur: Will the Leader of the House reconsider the question of the local government officers in Scotland? Will he recognise that his answers are completely unsatisfactory, because the carrying of messages to his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland produces no reaction of any kind at all? Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the Scottish business to which he referred for next Tuesday is not a suitable vehicle to discuss a matter of this kind, and will he even now try to persuade his right hon. Friend not to hide behind Written Answers but to make a statement and answer questions about this critical issue?

Mr. Crossman: I think that this is stirring up trouble without much basis. I believe that Question Time next Wednesday afternoon is likely to be devoted largely to Questions to my right hon. Friend. There is an opportunity, therefore, for asking him questions then. There is on Tuesday a whole day's business which is Scottish, and I would have thought that it was not beyond the wit of Scots to find a way of referring to this subject on one of those occasions.

Mr. MacArthur: On a point of order. If an hon. Member tables a Question to the Secretary of State next Wednesday about local government officers, is the Leader of the House saying that you, Mr. Speaker, will call that Question even if it is not reached?

Mr. Speaker: I did not understand the Leader of the House to say that. If he did, he was over-stating his capacity as Leader of the House.

Sir R. Russell: Reverting to the answer given by the Leader of the House to my two hon. Friends about the Livestock Export Control Bill, is the right hon. Gentleman not aware that the Bill is

being blocked by the Government Whips on duty? If they are doing that on a freelance basis, will he either remove them from the Front Bench, or remove the blockage?

Mr. Crossman: I said that the practice observed in the blocking was normal practice. It is true, as he says, that the individuals in question, I gather, were Government Whips. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] I said that I gather this is what the hon. Gentleman says. If he says this, I will certainly investigate the strength of it.

Mr. Heath: Is the right hon. Gentleman saying that the Government are now interfering with private Members' time on Friday and deliberately using all their powers to block these Bills?

Mr. Crossman: It is the hon. Gentleman who made this assertion, into which I will now inquire.

Mr. Edward M. Taylor: Would not the right hon. Gentleman agree that it is totally unfair for him to suggest that Scottish Members should dodge in and out of the rules of order next Wednesday to discuss a clear issue on which we need to have a clear and unambiguous statement? Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that there is an appalling and confused situation in Scotland which needs to be clarified and debated? Hon. Members from Scotland on both sides want this debate. Why will he not protect hon. Members and give us even three hours of debate next week?

Mr. Crossman: I said that the whole of Tuesday was to be devoted to Scottish business. In addition I added that on Wednesday afternoon most of Question Time would be dealing with Scotland. All I said was that I thought it unlikely that this question could not be raised in in the course of that period.

Sir R. Russell: If the right hon. Gentleman is not aware who is blocking these two Bills, will he be here at 4 o'clock tomorrow afternoon to see for himself?

Mr. Crossman: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making the assertion which he did. I said that I would investigate it.

Mr. John Fraser: Can my right hon. Friend say whether he has received an


assurance from the Opposition that they will cease to block the House of Lords Delaying Powers Bill?

Mr. Robert Cooke: Will the Leader of the House give a categorical assurance that the Government Whips will not block the Bill in question next Friday?

Mr. Crossman: I think that we had better first investigate the claim made by the hon. Gentleman.

Mr. Buchanan-Smith: Returning to the question of Scottish business next week, will the right hon. Gentleman give us a clear assurance that Scottish Members will be able to raise the question of N.A.L.G.O. in the debates next week and at Question Time, despite the narrow scope of the debate, and despite the fact that it is now too late to put down Questions for it? Can the right hon. Gentleman give us that assurance, because there is grave concern in Scotland about this matter?

Mr. Crossman: It is not for me to say what will and will not be in order in these debates. This is a matter for Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Peyton: The right hon. Gentleman used the words, "I gather that the individuals concerned were Government Whips". It had nothing to do with the suggestion made by my hon. Friend. Can the right hon. Gentleman produce any precedent for a predecessor in his position getting up at that Box and confessing that private Members' business is being blocked by Government Whips?

Mr. Crossman: The question of precedent is there. What happened was that the hon. Gentleman, if I did not misunderstand him, made an assertion that it had been blocked by Government Whips. I said that I would investigate this and give an answer.

Mr. Clark Hutchison: rose——

Mr. Speaker: Order. The hon. Member for Edinburgh, South (Mr. Clark Hutchison) is trying to put a second supplementary question. I am not prepared to have a second round unless the House advises me otherwise.

Sir Knox Cunningham: Does the Leader of the House not remember that

when I asked him last week why the Government were blocking these two Bills he sent me a letter explaining why they objected to them, and I asked why the Government should block them.

Mr. Crossman: The hon. and learned Gentleman must not be unreasonable. He asked what view we took of the Bills, and I thought he was asking me what we thought of the two Bills, and I gave the view expressed by the Minister of Agriculture about the qualities of the Bills. That is all he asked me for, and I gave it to him.

Sir Knox Cunningham: That is not so.

Mr. Speaker: Order. I have not called the hon. and learned Gentleman again.

Mr. Wolrige-Gordon: Reverting to the N.A.L.G.O. question, is the right hon. Gentleman aware that business in Scotland is as varied as business in England, and that there is a real concern that Scottish Members will not be able to get a clear guide from the Government next week about this issue, which is of very great importance to Scotland, unless special provision for it is made by the Secretary of State for Scotland either in a statement or in a debate on the matter?

Mr. Crossman: The Secretary of State for Scotland has sat listening to these interjections, and I have no doubt that he has heard and knows that there is a demand for a statement from him. We will wait and see what happens.

Mr. Goodhew: As the right hon. Gentleman seems incapable of protecting the interests of the House, will he kindly resign?

Sir T. Beamish: These two Bills have been blocked by the Government, and they will continue to be blocked by the Government; is that right?

Mr. Crossman: I do not want to be guilty of tedious repetition. What I have said is that we will inquire into the allegation of the hon. Gentleman.

Earl of Dalkeith: Would the Leader of the House take this matter of N.A.L.G.O. very much more seriously than he has done? Scotland is in a state of near revolt over this and if he does not allow Scottish Members special time for a debate on this matter he will drive Scotland to a state of nationalism.

Mr. Crossman: We have talked on this subject for some time. If it were true that Scotland is in a state of near revolt on this issue, then it would be a grave dereliction of duty on the part of the Opposition Front Bench not to take some of its Supply time to discuss it. There is a great deal of hypocrisy going on about this.

Sir Harmar Nicholls: The hon. and learned Member for Antrim, South (Sir Knox Cunningham) mentioned a letter and the Leader of the House gave his interpretation of what was contained in it. This was clearly about to be contested by my hon. and learned Friend. I agree that under the rules he could not put a second question without the permission of the House. Would it be possible for the House to give him that permission so that we can see what the truth is?

Mr. Speaker: It will be possible. I saw no indication that the House dissented from the view that I expressed, that at business time hon. Gentlemen should ask one business question. If it is a question of words, or accuracy between the two hon. Gentlemen—Sir Knox Cunningham.

Sir Knox Cunningham: Is the Leader of the House aware that last week I asked him in this House why the Government had blocked the Bills and he said that he would let me know? He wrote to me giving me the reasons. I have a copy of the letter here now.

Mr. Crossman: If the hon. and learned Gentleman wants to impugn my name, he can do so, but we are now dealing with business questions. If I remember rightly, the letter explained in what sense the Government approved and disapproved of the operation of these particular Bills.

Dame Irene Ward: May I ask the right hon. Gentleman to assure us that when this controversy has been settled and he has investigated what has been said and what has not been said, he will come before the House so that we can cross-examine him about the result of his findings? May I ask, Mr. Speaker, at what stage are back benchers allowed to ask you for your protection against the Executive? I am fed up with the Executive.

Mr. Speaker: I have never been aware that the hon. Lady needed any protection, even from Mr. Speaker.

Captain W. Elliot: May I refer to the question of a debate on Vietnam? As so many hon. Members opposite have raised important issues about Vietnam, will the Leader of the House reconsider whether we should have a debate? Surely it would give the Government a chance to make a clear and unequivocal statement. The Americans, Australians and New Zealanders, and others, are in Vietnam, fighting for principles which the British Government——

Mr. Speaker: Order. We are getting into an argument. We must not argue at this stage.

Mr. Crossman: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is as interested as everyone. In the last resort, in an issue as serious as Vietnam, we must leave it to the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister to decide whether it helps to have a debate. On balance they would rather not, but if the Opposition wants to insist upon a debate they have their method of doing so.

OFFICIAL REPORT (CORRECTION)

Mr. Powell: On a point of order. May I ask if you will direct that the OFFICIAL REPORT for yesterday should be corrected? In column 617 in the statement of the Secretary of State for Defence on Leslie Parkes he is there recorded as saying:
His commanding officer has formally dismissed the charge of desertion made against him.
The word "formally", though it occurred in the typescript of the right hon. Gentleman's statement, which was courteously provided to the Opposition, had been deleted in the typescript, and was not pronounced by the right hon. Gentleman. Therefore, as the OFFICIAL REPORT is a report of what was actually said and not of what at some previous time it might have been intended to say, may I ask you if you will give a direction that the word "formally" be expunged from the record?

Mr. Speaker: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for being so courteous as


to let me know this morning that he proposed to raise this matter. I have looked into it, and the facts are as the right hon. Gentleman has stated. In the original typescript the word "formally" occurred. The Minister decided to delete it, but unfortunately the reporter, in checking the typescript with what was said, put in the word "formally", although "formally" was not said. That correction will be made.
I think that the House would want me to take this opportunity of saying how much we are satisfied with the patient and diligent work of HANSARD under very great difficulties. I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman.

PRISON ESCAPES AND SECURITY

4.27 p.m.

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Roy Jenkins): I beg to move,
That this House takes note of the Report of the Inquiry into Prison Escapes and Security (Command Paper No. 3175).
The Mountbatten Inquiry was set up on 24th October last year in the immediate aftermath of the escape of George Blake. In asking a figure as distinguished as Lord Mountbatten to undertake the inquiry I was considerably influenced, not merely by the Blake escape, but by my own uneasiness about prison security generally. It was not that the number of escapes was increasing. For closed prisons, which is the most significant figure, we have not since got near to the peak of 114 for 1961.
The final figure for England and Wales, for 1966, with a prison population about 15 per cent. above that for 1961, was 86, which was higher than the 78 for 1965 but lower than the subsidiary peak of 93 for 1964. Nor do the figures for total escapes and abscondings, despite the flurry at the end of the year, show any significant recent increase. What was worrying, therefore, was not a sudden deterioration but the fact that a bad security situation had persisted for a long time.
This contained at least two dangers. First, it was bound to be bad for the morale of prison officers—a very heavily burdened body of men. When prison escapes dominate the news to the extent that they have done at times in the recent past, it is not altogether pleasant being Home Secretary. But I suspect that it is a good deal worse being a prison officer, particularly at one of the gaols which is attracting most attention, and where the most difficult problems have to be faced.
Secondly, it is inevitable that if our general prison security is indifferent we shall lose some prisoners who are either of considerable importance to the State or a real menace to the public. I am, therefore, quite sure that, contrary to the view which some right hon. Gentlemen opposite took at the time, it was right to charge the Mountbatten Inquiry with the


general problem as well as with a specific inquest into the Blake escape. I never saw the one as being the enemy of the other and I found it difficult to understand why anyone who has read the Report would now take this view.
Lord Mountbatten conducted a searching inquiry into Blake, and to believe that a judicial inquiry could have told us more would demand an even greater respect for judges than I, at least, possess. I do not intend to go into great detail about the escape of George Blake, which was debated very fully on 31st October. If there are any particular points on Blake which hon. Members wish to raise I shall be glad to deal with them when, with the permission of the House, I answer the debate tonight. I made no secret of the fact, in my speech on 31st October, that serious mistakes have been made. the most basic being the fact that Blake was at Wormwood Scrubs at all. The House will have noted in the Mountbatten Report the conclusion that Wormwood Scrubs as constructed and administered had little chance of holding Blake once he had determined to go. To that extent, Blake's escape was a particularly striking example of how out-of-date prison buildings, coupled with mistakes in the categorisation of prisoners, lead almost inevitably to escapes.
But Lord Mountbatten, in one of the swiftest and most vigorous investigations which can be recalled, did more than deal with Blake. He also provided, with the help of Mr. Robert Mark, a detailed investigation into the case of Frank Mitchell, as well as into that of certain other notorious escapees of the past three years. Still more important, however, he provided an analysis, at once ruthless and humane, of the problems of the modern prison service, and a blueprint for its improvement in future.
To have done all this within two months was a remarkable achievement, and I think that the House and the nation are once again deeply in the debt of Lord Mountbatten. In addition, I believe that we would wish to extend our gratitude to the three assessors who worked so closely and energetically with him. The analysis pinpointed the difficulty of trying to run a modern penal policy within a framework of buildings constructed mostly 100 years or so ago

for an entirely different sort of regime and with a prison service which had suffered from a good deal of neglect from successive Governments.
The blueprint took the form of 52 recommendations. I immediately announced that I hoped to be able to carry out almost all of them and I think that it can be said that we have not, so far, made bad progress. Within two or three weeks of the Report's publication, despite the intervention of the Christmas holidays, we had set 34 of the recommendations in train. This was partly but not wholly because we had already been thinking and working along the lines of the Report.
We have, for instance, already been working on the more effective categorisation of prisoners along the lines of recommendations 1, 4, 5 and 11. We were, therefore, able to start on a scheme very quickly and within two weeks from now this will be brought into full effect as regards new prisoners. It will inevitably take time to complete the assessment of those already in prison, but a review has already been completed of prisoners in the categories of highest risk—category A, and the borderline between category A and category B. Where necessary, transfers have been ordered to make the best possible use of such highly secure accommodation as exists at present.
The Mountbatten recommendations on categorisation need to be read in the light of Lord Mountbatten's general statement that the 19th century buildings, particularly when there is severe overcrowding, will inevitably enable some prisoners to escape. Account should also be taken of his view that it is not unreasonable for certain risks to be taken in allocating prisoners to open prisons. The principles on which we have been working took into account not only the likelihood of an escape being attempted by a particular prisoner, but also the seriousness of the consequences if his escape were successful.
I must, however, give two warnings to the House. The first is to stress that no system of categorisation will ever be perfect. We shall make the best possible judgments we can on the basis of expert and experienced advice, but we shall have to do so on the basis that, if category A, the maximum security category, is to


have real meaning, it must be used very sparingly. That means that some pretty ugly characters will be in category B—and rightly in category B, because they could only be in category A at the expense of moving from that category some still notorious or potentially menacing prisoners.
There may be occasional misjudgments, and what may seem good judgments when they are made and would be held by the House and the public to be very good judgments in the vast majority of cases in which they work out well, may look very bad judgments in the tiny minority of cases in which they go wrong. The difficulties of categorisation are well brought out in that section of the Report dealing with the case of Frank Mitchell. This section exposed certain abuses relating to the so-called "honour party" at Dartmoor.
That party was immediately called in, as, for a short time, were the other outside working parties. The honour party, as opposed to the other outside parties, has not since been resumed, although it will be as soon as arrangements for better supervision are made. Lord Mountbatten thought it a mistake that Mitchell was allowed on the honour party, as the House will recall, not because of his record, but because he had not been given a release date.
I agree with that. But Lord Mountbatten also thought that there was much to be said for allowing Mitchell on a more closely supervised working party outside. This, he thought, would have been the logical development of decisions made about Mitchell's treatment over a number of years. This greater supervision on a normal outside working party would have avoided Mitchell's indulging in most of the headline-catching abuses, but it would not necessarily have prevented his escape.
No outside working party can approach conditions of really close security; yet if Mitchell had been treated strictly in accordance with the ex post view of this independent inquiry, his escape would still have attracted great public concern and some substantial criticism. However, had his treatment gone well—the treatment of many men with pretty horrible records does go very well—there

would, of course, have been no public acclaim or notice, merely a certain sense of quiet satisfaction among some devoted and courageous members of the prison department and the prison service.
This illustrates the dilemma inherent in any system of classification. I can assure the House that I have many such dilemmas on my hands at present. Decisions which look perfectly sensible when taken, quickly cease to look sensible if they go wrong.
The second warning which I must give the House relates to our present lack of adequately secure prison accommodation. Lord Mountbatten went so far as to say that we have no really secure prison, and there was some evidence that a number of prisoners immediately took him at his word. We do, of course, have the three maximum security blocks at Dartmoor, Leicester and Parkhurst, and I am ensuring that, subject to keeping the minimum of elbow room for high security new arrivals, we are using these to the full, but they are not really suitable for long-term confinement. A very delicate balance has to be struck, as was perhaps illustrated at Durham last week, between the demands of strict custody in unsuitable accommodation and the avoidance of dangerous tensions.
It is, therefore, crucially important to press ahead with the building of the new maximum security prison in the Isle of Wight. This was dealt with in recommendations 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 29, 42 and 45, of the Mountbatten Report——

Mr. Mark Woodnutt: Although Lord Mountbatten is doubtless correct to say that no prison is secure, would the right hon. Gentleman make it clear that these top security blocks within the prisons at Parkhurst, Leicester and Durham are highly secure, as it might give rise to a good deal of gloom and despondency otherwise?

Mr. Jenkins: Lord Mountbatten, of course, made his own judgment. These are the most secure accommodation we have, and we believe them to be pretty secure. We have not lost anybody from them, but, as I stressed to the House, they are unsuitable for long-term confinement and this is our problem. But, of course, they do offer conditions of pretty high security. There is no question about that at all.


The eight recommendations of the Mountbatten Report which I mentioned by their nature stand outside the 34 which we were able to put into operation almost immediately. They relate to the maximum security prison which has to be built in the future. This prison, in Lord Mountbatten's view, cannot be completed before June, 1969. It will be a hard struggle to meet this date, but I am determined that we shall do our very best.
The decision to build the prison had been taken before the inquiry was begun. Final decisions were deferred in case the Report recommended other arrangements. The endorsement of the Home Office proposal in the Report, however, has enabled work to be resumed at once, but the original plan to provide 80 places has been amended in the light of the new assessment of the number of prisoners who need maximum security, and there are now to be 120 places which, to begin with, should provide a small reserve.
If the present volume of crimes of extreme gravity continues, or even increases, a second maximum security prison may be needed. Some preliminary study has been undertaken of its location. Perhaps; I could conveniently add, even though this belongs in some respect to a different group of recommendations relating to the prison service, that the recommendation that there should be a small allowance for duty in the new maximum security prison has been accepted in principle, as has the recommendation that tours of duty there should be short. In the meantime, however—but not merely in the meantime, for we will always have substantial numbers of potentially dangerous prisoners who do not quite qualify for Category A—it is essential that we press on with improving physical security at most of the existing closed prisons. There are a large number of recommendations—I think 17, to be precise—leading to this point.
The measures being taken to improve the physical security of prisons are concentrated on making the perimeter walls themselves more secure, installing devices which will give early warning of any attempt to breach or climb the wall, and communication systems which will enable reserves of manpower, both prison officers and police, to be directed urgently to the point at which an attack is being

made, whether from the inside or from the outside.
A survey has been completed of the perimeter walls of all closed prisons. Over many years—in some cases over a century—buildings have been put up either abutting the prison walls or adjoining them, which compromise their effectiveness as a barrier to ecape. Some of these constructions can be got rid of at comparatively little cost. Others involve longer-term projects before the prison wall can be considered secure, and in other cases we shall have to decide to classify the prison, because of these abutting buildings, as suitable only for Category C prisoners—those who need minimum security.
To give early warning of any attempt to breach perimeter walls, we are using a combination of mechanical devices and additional manpower. Floodlighting of walls and yards will be installed at a large number of closed prisons, electronic warning devices will be installed on the walls themselves, and there will be prison officers on patrol in the yards and on the perimeter at night, as well as during the day, equipped with pocket radio to a control room in the prison and supplemented by patrols with dogs and dog handlers.
The prison control room will have a direct v.h.f. radio link to the police headquarters of the force in the police area in which the prison is situated. Where this is appropriate, the electronic warning devices, as well as giving an alarm in the prison control room, will give an automatic alarm to the information room in police headquarters.
It will inevitably take some time, as Lord Mountbatten indicated in his Report, before this programme of work can be completed, but good progress has already been made. At Wormwood Scrubs and Wakefield, all the measures I have described are now installed, except for the clearance of some obstructions in the area of the prison walls, and work is in progress on the site at several other prisons. Direct v.h.f. links with the police are now in operation at 36 establishments.
I am very grateful indeed to the Commissioner of Police in the Metropolis and to Chief Constables throughout the country for their ready co-operation, especially as some of the help they are


giving, particularly with dog patrols, while the prison service is building up its own team of dogs and handlers, has placed a heavy additional burden on their own resources.

Mr. Hugh Fraser: In the Mountbatten Report there was a reference to night guards. I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman has anything to say about them. Those men are very old, underpaid, and clearly not up to their duties.

Mr. Jenkins: I have indeed something to say about that. Although I agree that on one showing it could come logically at this point, perhaps the right hon. Gentleman would allow me to develop it in another part of my speech, where I think it fits in even more logically.
I would not wish our approach to the inadequacies of existing prisons, however, to be thought of exclusively in security terms. Custody is an important part of a prison sentence, but it is by no means the only part. The central purpose must be, if I may quote the prison rules of 1964, to encourage and assist men to live good and useful lives afterwards. This is much less likely to be achieved with archaic buildings, gross overcrowding, inadequate work facilities and disgusting sanitary conditions, than with good modern facilities.
I am particularly glad that Lord Mountbatten was as shocked as I have been on the last point. The gaols of most other advanced countries are well ahead of ours from a sanitary point of view. "Slopping out" finds no place in the prison regimes of the United States, Germany, Sweden or Switzerland, and it is an astonishing commentary on our late 19th century civilisation that when Pentonville was built as the first of the "new model" prisons in 1842, it was provided with proper lavatory facilities in the cells, but some years later those lavatories were taken out at quite considerable expense.
Since then nothing has been allowed to interfere with the sacred practice of "slopping out". Even the new prisons at Blunderston and Gartree make no improvement in this respect, nor, I greatly regret to say, does the new Albany prison, to be opened this April. But we shall be able, if I may use a piece of

old Ministry of Aviation jargon, to retrofit it, and this we propose to do at the earliest opportunity. With the new maximum security prison, there will be no need for a retrofit because it will be done from the beginning.
Sanitary problems are, however, by no means the only problems associated with our old prisons. They are also totally unsuited to a modern constructive penal régime. They were designed for security in the cell rather than at the perimeter, and that can only be effective if a semi-dungeon régime is to be the order of the day. Furthermore, our old gaols are really bogus Bastilles. They combine insecurity with presenting a lowering, depressing appearance to the areas which surround them. Dartmoor was built for Napoleonic war prisoners, and should be closed down as soon as possible. Our big city local gaols were mostly built half a century or so later, but are almost equally unsuitable today. They also occupy most valuable land. There would be many advantages if they could be re-sited and re-built outside the urban areas.
Since the White Paper of 1959, which came at the end of a long period covering the whole of this century up to 1959, during which virtually no new prison building was done, a substantial amount of new construction has been undertaken. Forty-six new establishments of all sorts, amounting to an additional 7,360 places, have since been provided, but the prison population has gone up faster. There has, therefore, been no significant replacement of out-of-date establishments. Today my dilemma is still more accute. The prison population rose by no less than 3,642 in 1966. A present forecast is that it will rise by about another 4,000 before we get to the autumn of this year.
Then the Criminal Justice Bill should come into operation. In that Bill we are doing everything we can to swim against this tide. Apart from the detailed provisions of the Bill, 1 cannot stress sufficiently the self-defeating nature from a whole variety of points of view, of any unnecessary decision by a sentencing authority to send a person to prison. But the Criminal Justice Bill, in the short run at least, can do little more than take a few determined steps down an escalator which is moving rapidly upwards. This year, therefore, as an emergency


measure, I am having to give urgent consideration to taking over certain existing military camps and using them to house about 1,200 category C prisoners after the installation of basic perimeter security.
In these circumstances, immediate replacement of out-of-date prisons is not possible, but I shall be very disappointed if, despite the exigencies of the present financial situation, I cannot start something worth while in that direction. It is an essential ingredient of an effective modern penal system.
I turn now to a separate and most vital group of Mountbatten recommendations, those for improving staff structure, conditions and training. No fewer than 22 recommendations fall within this category, and that is as it should be, for the efficiency of the prison system depends tremendously upon the morale, skill and devotion of those who work within a service which inevitably presents many difficulties and problems. Those in this service—governors, assistant governors, prison officers and others—have had and are having a pretty hard time. In advance of the physical measures, they have been making determined and successful attempts to improve security by their own efforts, and the results so far this year are pretty good, although I do not want to place too much reliance on six weeks' experience, because we are far from out of this wood yet. But the efforts which they have been making, and making successfully, impose great strains upon them.
As the short-term physical improvements, such as floodlighting, come into operation, the strain upon the staff will become somewhat less. More important, the Mountbatten Report holds out to the prison service the prospect of a substantial improvement in career prospects and public esteem. Lord Mountbatten was particularly concerned with the absence of promotion prospects for as long as 16 years, and he recommended the introduction of a new intermediate rank of senior prison officer. The Government accept that recommendation, and I hope that the rank can be introduced in the autumn.
Promotion, Lord Mountbatten thought, should be more on merit and we accept that, too, as we do the recommendation for a special allowance for those who are trained in and undertake special security

duties. Equally, we want night patrols to be undertaken increasingly by prison officers themselves, and this, too, will involve an allowance. We are also considering an allowance for those trained in dog handling, a most useful security device. Security training courses in sophisticated security techniques are being currently set up. On all these matters we clearly need discussion with the Prison Officers' Association, and these discussions have already begun.
Lord Mountbatten also recommended that staff establishments should be realistically reassessed. That has started and will be complete at all closed prisons by the end of the year and earlier at those of high priority from a security point of view. We shall, in any event, need to recruit 3,800 discipline officers over the next three years to take account of normal wastage, the needs of new establishments, new security duties and five-day week working at single-shift prisons. Fortunately, recruiting is currently going well and 180 officers joined in the first six weeks of this year. Applications are nearly double the rate at which they were last year. Staff housing, with which we are pressing on, is clearly of great importance in this connection.
Lord Mountbatten also recommended—and attached great importance to this—a new professional head of the prison service with the title of inspector-general. I am very glad that Brigadier Mark Maunsell has agreed to be the first holder of this post. For the head of a disciplined service and yet one whose problems are very different from those of an Armed Service, his combination of a successful Regular Army career followed by a decade of high executive work in industry and commerce was, I thought, just right. The House will recollect that Lord Mountbatten specifically recommended that this appointment should in the first instance be made from outside.
The general picture, therefore, is one of what I think we can call vigorous implementation of the Mountbatten recommendations. The number on which we are currently acting has now increased from 34 to 46. The remaining six are all necessarily longer-term, because they are concerned with the procedures when the new maximum security prison in the Isle of Wight is ready.


It is right that we should pay great attention to all these security matters at the present time, but we must not and will not do so at the price of in any way turning our backs on the advances towards a more humane and constructive penal system which have been made under successive Governments in recent years. That was Lord Mountbatten's attitude, and it is certainly mine. if it is not that of any hon. Member in any part of the House or of any people outside, perhaps I may remind them of some words of one of my most distinguished predecessors at the Home Office, Sir Winston Churchill, who, when Liberal Home Secretary in 1910, and after, I may say, he had involved himself and not only himself, but Mr. Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer—which I have not yet done—in even more trouble over a gentleman known as "The Dartmoor Shepherd" than I have been in over Frank Mitchell, said:
The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country. A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused …and even of the convicted criminals against the State, a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment, tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerative processes, and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man—these are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in R."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 20th July, 1910; Vol. 19, c. 1354.]
I agree that, whatever the climate may be from time to time, that is the consistent purpose which should inspire all Home Secretarys. It is certainly the purpose from which I have no intention of deviating.

4.58 p.m.

Mr. Quintin Hogg: Obviously, to follow a Minister who has covered a great deal of ground with a great number of separate points of policy is something of a meal to undertake and there are, therefore, only a limited number of comments which I can make at this stage upon the announcements which the right hon. Gentleman has made, except, of course, to congratulate him un-

reservedly on the piece of Churchillian prose with which his speech fittingly concluded.
There can be no question of voting on a Motion or Report of this kind. It would have been easy to devise an Amendment covering many of the points which the right hon. Gentleman, in the inevitable sequence of events, has covered. If I am a little more critical both of the Report and of his speech it is not because I desire either to make the right hon. Gentleman's task more difficult or to oppose for the sake of opposing. On the contrary. I shall conclude by stressing that the task which the right hon. Gentleman has set himself—whatever criticisms we may feel—is one in which he deserves the active support of not only this House but of all right thinking people.
To me, the most peculiar omission from the Report—and from the right hon. Gentleman's speech—was its failure to highlight what seems to be the common feature of all the escapes with which the Report began—Wilson in 1964; Biggs in 1965; McVickar and a number of others from a coach in 1966; Mitchell, while the investigation was still proceeding in Dartmoor in 1966; Blake, who was mentioned specially in the terms of reference; and the six prisoners who escaped from the Scrubs in June, 1966.
The common feature of all those escapes, with the possible exception of McVickar, is that it was not the people inside the prison who escaped so much as professional organisations outside who rescued them. This is the nub of the problem. I agree—and I will say more about this later—with the right hon. Gentleman's and the Report's criticisms of the structure, design and siting of our prisons. But the fact of the matter is that the question of security, with which we are confronted today, is only one aspect of the war against organised crime which we must face in considering the penal system as a whole.
If these prisoners had simply been delinquents and if they had had no friends outside, either they would not have been rescued or, having escaped, they would have been quickly recaptured. It is the fight against crime which must be solved, and we will not solve any of the fundamental problems simply by altering the design and siting of our prisons or even


by improving the morale of the Prison Service. Yet of course I agree that the picture which emerges regarding the physical buildings—designed for solitary confinement as their principal means of penal treatment; and their use now as instruments of a more liberal policy, for which they were never intended—a picture of prisons sited on the most valuable sites in urban areas and casting an atmosphere of gloom all around, of prisons overcrowded, squalid and insecure, is a picture which it is extremely unpleasant to have to face.
I was particularly glad that the Home Secretary took, as a special point of attack, the question of their sanitary arrangements. I had been designing to do so. I was afraid that, if I did, I would be accused by hon. Members of selecting the trivial at the expense of the important. Personally, I attach the greatest importance to this matter and I am, therefore, glad to know that the right hon. Gentleman does, too.
One cannot rehabilitate a man by degrading him physically. The sanitary conditions in prison must shock anyone—and many hon. Members know the truth of this—who has been to see them; and seeing is not the only sense which is affected. It is no good talking about rehabilitating people when we compel them to live three in a cell, of nineteenth century design, designed for one, and then compel them to queue up in the morning carrying chamber pots at the slopping out. This must be stopped because it is cruelty—and I stress that it is cruelty—of which a decent society should be ashamed when dealing with even the most desperate characters. And many of the people we send to prison are not desperate characters, a subject to which I will come shortly.
What about the Service itself? 1 respectfully suggest that it is undertrained—without any form of staff college, or course. And, secondly—because the recommendation of the Report has been accepted—it is under-inspected—the fundamental rule of all administration. public and private, being that where there is no inspection there is no efficiency. It is under-manned and probably underpaid, with inadequate prospects of promotion and with no proper provision for welfare. This, again, is a vision of a

social service which it is not pleasant to contemplate.
A point of criticism of the Report is that the prison service has not yet been properly slotted into the need for social work generally. Prison warders may be said largely to be a service apart. Perhaps they always will be. However, there ought—and this is a general problem of social policy with which the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues must concern themselves—to be a larger organisation of social workers in the community with a closer liaison between the prison service and other forms of social work which may be allied to it. Probation officers form an obvious example. There should also be a breaking down of the isolation that exists between the prison service and other forms of social work; the provision of adequate training courses on which they will meet other social workers, and so on. These things should be considered not only in the context of prison security—although they are clearly relevant in that context—but in the general context of the kind of society which we are slowly trying to build.
In spite of the conciliatory language of the Report—and I absolutely agree with Lord Mountbatten's approach to avoid the allocation of blame, except where blame is obviously appropriate—there were a series of deplorable errors of judgment, for which I do not seek to make the right hon. Gentleman personally responsible. Some of them did not even take place during his period of office. However, in Wilson's case, the keys were counterfeited and the counterfeits tried and tested in the locks before actually being used. In Biggs's case, information about which exercise squad Biggs would be in was available outside the prison probably within minutes of his being allocated to that exercise squad.
In the McVicar case, adequate warning was given of the approaching trouble before the journey began. Unsuitable transport was used, the prisoners had keys to their own handcuffs, and three out of the six modern sets of handcuffs available had no keys and could not be used. As a matter of efficiency, that is really not good enough.
In the Blake case, the governor suggested a transfer in 1965 and got no answer out of the Home Office, although


accommodation in a secure prison was available at that time for him without displacing anyone else.
In Mitchell's case, one can only say from the very clear statement of facts which appears from Mr. Marks's Report, the governor, the deputy governor, the chaplain and the medical officer all reported at length on the prisoner, apparently without being in the least aware that he was terrorising the warders, enslaving his fellow prisoners, regularly visiting two public houses, returning to the prison in hired taxis, and buying budgerigars in Peter Tavey.
The answer must be that, in the short term, the Home Secretary should concentrate on the improvement of morale in the Prison Service and the administrative machine in the Home Office.
May I say a word about that administrative machine? The nature of the party struggle in this House rather tends to divert attention from the Civil Service. In the last debate that we had on the subject, at one point we seemed to be arguing how many more prisoners escaped under the Tories than under the Socialist Government. I am not sure that the right hon. Gentleman was wholly innocent of drawing up a league table in that respect.
That is hardly the way to approach the matter. One cannot overlook the fact, and one ought to say, that there are features in these escapes and in the Report itself which indicate that the Home Office has let down successive Home Secretaries of different complexions. We are living with prisons disgustingly overcrowded, with a Prison Service inadequately trained and whose morale could be better, and with an administrative machine which has been outgrown by the prison population. Those are not matters which have occurred overnight. They are matters which it must have been the duty of a properly organised Department to warn successive Ministers of both parties about, and I doubt whether they were adequately warned.
No one envies the position of either a Department or a Home Secretary. At about the time when Mr. Butler brought forward the rolling 10-year plan, to which the right hon. Gentleman referred obliquely, I can remember saying to one of

my colleagues, "It is difficult in a democracy, when we are short of roads, schools, houses and hospitals, to ask the public to vote for a new range of penal institutions provided at enormous expense"—which is what they cost. No one envies the Home Secretary or his Department the task of trying to sell that kind of programme to the public.
Here, 1 wish to make a point in a sentence or two, although I appreciate that I cannot develop it. We find that the various construction industries are one of the principal limiting factors on good government. The capacity of the construction industries of all sorts competing for necessary rebuilding in all directions is, far more than money in some ways, the limiting factor on good government. The Home Secretary is bound to some extent to be the Cinderella when people without homes and who have votes are expected to postpone their homes for the sake of a new prison with adequate security within sight of the lodgings where they are dwelling uncomfortably. These are the realities of democracy.
Before turning back to the Report, there is something else which I should like to have seen in it but which I did not see, perhaps inevitably. The right hon. Gentleman referred to it in the latter part of his speech. Why do we send people to prison? It is all very well to say, in noble prose, that the object is to rehabilitate them. But is anyone rehabilitated by being deprived of his liberty? A solicitor embezzles his clients' money. A Sikh pub-keeper makes a false declaration to the Income Tax authorities. A clergyman is caught yielding to carnal desires with some of his male staff. What do we do to them? We send them to prison.
If one goes to the Court of Criminal Appeal or its present equivalent and says that that is a bad idea, one is laughed at. But why do we send them to prison? What have we in mind, and what has Parliament in mind when it sustains the law which says so? What has the court in mind when it say, "We cannot overlook this offence"? It is very important to realise that it is no good deceiving oneself with sentimental nonsense about rehabilitation. We send them to prison because we do not know what else to do with them.

Mr. Sydney Silverman: I am grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for giving way in what is a very interesting part of his speech, but what does he think that a learned magistrate in the Midlands had in mind the other clay when he sent a girl of 22 to gaol for three mouths for driving a car four days too early?

Mr. Hogg: I do not want to comment on individual cases. It might be that such a case could be dealt with on appeal, and it might be that it was wrong. I have mentioned cases which are ordinarily dealt with by a prison sentence by any standard court. In fact, if I were a Recorder, as many hon. and learned Members are, probably I should visit such cases with prison myself.
What good do we get out of it? The answer is that the courts and Parliament send such people to prison because they feel that their offences cannot he overlooked, as they are far too serious and yet they do not know what else to do with them.
The truth is that we have to find something else to do with them, and, until we find something else, we shall not solve the problem of prison security. As I said at the beginning we have to isolate the problem of professional and dangerous crime to deal with the security of our prisons. At present, they are cluttered up with people who have committed serious offences but who present no security problem, and who are rotting their hearts out, deprived of their liberty, in overcrowded and disgusting conditions, without any constructive work, simply because we do not know what else to do with them. It really is not good enough.
Some people talk in the most sentimental way about providing work in prisons, but a prison cannot be turned into a factory. The physical conditions are impossible. The fact is that prison treatment must be supplanted at some stage by a more constructive method of penal treatment, and it was precisely for that reason that I thought that it was the greatest of calamities when, in the early days of his period of office, the right hon. Gentleman connived at the murder of the Royal Commission on Penal Reform, though I do not believe that he would do it now.

Mr. John Wells: My right hon. and learned Friend has said that a prison cannot be turned into a factory. I have visited prisons in many countries. Quite the most successful prison I have ever visited was one in Yugoslavia which was indeed a factory. The sanitary arrangements, which are usually unpleasant in prisons, were perfect in that place.

Mr. Hogg: I agree that the bad sanitary arrangements are not necessary anywhere. But a factory requires a proper flow of work, a properly designed layout, the proper proportion of persons with suitable skills, the proper machinery, and the proper product to be sold on the market. None of these conditions is present in prisons.
I agree that constructive work must be found for prisoners. When the solicitor who embezzles his client's money, when the parson who goes wrong, when the man who delivers a false Income Tax return, are punished, they must be found, under suitable conditions, with suitable restrictions on liberty, constructive and useful social work to do.
The truth of the matter is that this society and our legal system has never faced up to the fact that the only way of rehabilitating a man is that he should do work, either directly repairing by his earnings the damage which he has done to his individual victim, or do work which identifies him with society once more, making reparation for the wrong he has done to the general public.
The object of prison should be to keep people out of mischief. Prisoners should be mainly there because they have chosen to stay or because they would be dangerous if they were let out. Rehabilitation should, wherever possible, be carried out in different conditions elsewhere. Of course the prisoners inside closed institutions must be treated with humanity. They must never feel themselves, even at their worst, to be wholly outside the range of human compassion. However, anybody who believes that inside a closed institution, in the company that is found there, people can be rehabilitated on a grand scale is deceiving himself. Other methods must be found.

Mr. Victor Yates: What the right hon. and learned


Gentleman has said largely applies to local prisons. Does he not agree that in the training prisons like Wakefield, where it has been possible to provide a prisoner with a 40-hour week, the conditions have resulted in a correction of prisoners in a very satisfactory manner? Do not we want to make our local prisons more like our regional prisons, as has been done in some other countries?

Mr. Hogg: I would not in the least deny that great improvements have been made. However, I do not want to turn this speech into a speech on penal treatment. We must do the best we can so long as we have prisons and prisoners. We can do a very great deal.
I was saying that we must go deeper than that. A form of penal treatment must be found for the man who has gone seriously wrong and whose wrongdoing cannot be overlooked by society. Constructive work must be found for him to do which does not involve incarceration in a closed institution. Until that answer has been found—it will involve legislation as well as administrative action—the problem of prison security will not be dealt with.
For that reason, I would contend that the Report does not go deep enough into the problem it has to solve. It would be grossly churlish of me not to agree with what the Home Secretary said by way of personal tribute to Lord Mountbatten. To produce a Report in that spell of time, with so much in it, was obviously a tour de force, and Lord Mountbatten's undertaking of the work, as I said when he was appointed, was another tribute to his public spirit. What I have to say by way of criticism of the exercise is not to be interpreted, therefore, as intended as an attack on Lord Mountbatten.
As the Home Secretary knows. I was always against the form of this exercise. The right hon. Gentleman rather patted himself on the back at the beginning of his speech for his part in devising it. I do not pat him on the back. I always, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, would have preferred a separate report on Blake.
I think that this Report entirely supports the criticism I have to make. What does it tell us about Blake that we want

to know? Who got him out? With what degree of organisation? What was the escape route? Where is he now? What is known about his subsequent movements? Why was not more done to catch him?
This is what the Report says about the time from when Blake reached the prison gate:
I have not carried my inquiries further, since the hunt for Blake is the responsibility of the police. I conclude my account of Blake's escape by reiterating that Wormwood Scrubs Prison as constructed and administered had little chance of holding him once he had determined to go and that he had ample time to make good his escape before any effective search for him began.
I could have told the House that in October. It did not require all the services of one of the most distinguished subjects of the Crown to reach that conclusion about Blake. I asked for a special inquiry from the first. I hope that the Home Secretary will not again quote out of context a remark which I made when he had turned down my request. I then asked him at least to do something about what my right hon. Friend had suggested, that Blake's escape should be an integral part of this Inquiry.
The terms of reference of this Inquiry, that Lord Mountbatten should look into prison escapes, with particular reference to the Blake escape, ensured from the start that nothing that we wanted to know about Blake should ever be known as a result of Lord Mountbatten's efforts.

Mr. Peter Archer: Would the right hon. and learned Gentleman tell the House what kind of inquiry might have been expected to reveal who got Blake out and where he is now?

Mr. Hogg: If there had been a special inquiry into the circumstances of Blake's escape and what was known about it, not stopping at the prison gates we might have got—I cannot guarantee that we would, but at least we might have got—an inquiry which revealed something. What is clear from paragraph 95 of the Report, which I have read in extenso, is that we were debarred by the terms of reference, in advance, from knowing anything.
The other thing I wanted to get—I told the Home Secretary this at the time—was


an inquiry in depth into prison security. Although I think that a very great deal has come out of this Report, and certainly Lord Mountbatten has revealed his own humane feelings on the matter, it did not require a great——

Mr. Roy Jenkins: Before the right hon. and learned Gentleman leaves the first point, I intervene to say that I am a little puzzled by one aspect of his view on this matter. As I understood it, right from the beginning he and his right hon. Friends attached great importance to urgency. I do not take the point that eventually he asked that Blake's escape be made an integral part of the Mountbatten Inquiry, because the right hon. and learned Gentleman might have preferred a separate inquiry. However, does the right hon. and learned Gentleman think that any form of inquiry could have gone urgently into the question of exactly what the police do or do not know about where Blake is now and have published the findings urgently? That would have been most extraordinary.

Mr. Hogg: We cannot speculate about what the inquiry could have inquired into or about what security considerations would have intervened. We were merely told that there was no security question in relation to Blake. I never believed it, but that is what we were told. We wanted a separate inquiry which would have revealed all this. If the inquirer, whoever he had been, has said, "There are certain aspects of this case which cannot be discussed, in the public interest", we might have been satisfied.
All we have, in fact, is the worst of both worlds. We have no report in depth—I think that this is the point which the right hon. Gentleman has not hoisted in—on prison security, because, in two months, Lord Mountbatten had to concentrate on the bare bones of what was known already. And we have no report on Blake which has yielded anything which we wanted to know and did not know already. We would have liked an inquiry which, in relation to prison security and prison treatment generally, repaired some of the damage done by the destruction of the Royal Commission on Penal Treatment, but this also we cannot have.
I have said what I have partly by way of praise for the Home Secretary and partly by way of criticism. I assure the

House that we on this side wish the Home Secretary nothing but good in the task which he has undertaken. It was not unnatural, perhaps, when the series of escapes which gave rise to the Inquiry reached its peak at about Christmas time, that some of my hon. Friends should have called for the right hon. Gentleman's resignation. In this, of course, they were taking a leaf out of the Foreign Secretary's book, whose venomous and personal attack on Mr. Henry Brooke, as he then was, in similar circumstances, was one of the least edifying episodes in that right hon. Gentleman's rather chequered career. But I do not propose to pursue in Opposition conduct which I condemned in that right hon. Gentleman when I was in Government.
I do not consider that a Minister should resign every time anything goes wrong in his Department, and for the Home Secretary personally I have the usual love-hate relationship which the shadow must necessarily have for his opposite number. When I am tempted to call for the right hon. Gentleman's resignation, I am reminded of the words in "Cautionary Tales for Children",
Be sure to keep tight hold of nurse For fear of finding something worse.
I can think of many right hon and hon. Gentlemen on the opposite benches who are worse than the Home Secretary.
What we have a right to expect from the right hon. Gentleman is not that he should resign every time something goes wrong but that he should arrange a system which does not go wrong. The Mountbatten Report at least establishes that such a system will not easily be erected and it will not be erected in one or two years.
I say this now both to hon. Members opposite and to some of my hon. Fliends. The Home Secretary has been subjected to a good deal of criticism in recent months. With some of it I agree and with some of it I do not. But if the House and the country want the right to criticise the right hon. Gentleman—we all enjoy the right to criticise him and other members of the Government—if they want him to win the war against organised crime, they must provide him with the tools to do the job.
Not only when we are discussing prison security and escapes but when we are discussing housing, hospitals, roads,


schools and the rest, we must remember the right hon. Gentleman's demands upon us. We must provide him with the buildings. We must provide him with the men. We must provide him with the equipment, expensive modern equipment of which the prison service is almost wholly innocent, or so one thought at least until the right hon. Gentleman's speech this afternoon. We must provide him with the money. But not only that.
When the Home Secretary comes back to us, as he will from time to time, to ask for sensible changes in the institutional and procedural framework of the law which may upset established principles and prejudices, both below the Gangway opposite and sometimes on my own side of the House, too, we must not sentimentalise or romanticise unduly about the status quo. We have the right to criticise the right hon. Gentleman as being unduly namby-pamby with the criminal only if we can honestly say that we have supported him in any reasonable demands he may make.
I conclude by proposing what I think he should do in the long term and in the short term. In the short term, the right hon. Gentleman must concentrate on a minimum building programme of security accommodation, on the reorganisation of the prison department in the Home Office, on the provision of an adequate inspectorate of prisons, on the provision of staff courses and security training for the inspectors and for prison officers, on the provision of proper transport, proper equipment and proper communications for the Prison Service, on the improvement of discipline, morale, promotion prospects and welfare in the Prison Service.
In the long term, he must look to replacing and re-siting almost all—or perhaps all—the existing prisons. He must look to creating a totally new method of rehabilitation and penal treatment. He must educate the public to realise the full gravity of the situation as regards organised crime. He must improve communication between the Prison service and the police, and he must largely improve the relations of both with members of the public.

5.36 p.m.

Mr. Frank Tomney: I shall not follow the right hon.

and learned Member for St. Marylebone (Mr. Hogg) in his spate of rhetoric about the reform of the penal system. That is for another time and another day, and, important as it is, we have far narrower issues to consider in the context of the Mountbatten Report which merit our immediate attention.
My right hon. Friend presented the Report in a factual speech, admitting the shortcomings of the Prison Service and his responsibilities for the future. The strength, or the weakness, of a democracy is usually that it is wise after the event. One may advance strictures about the escapes of all the prisoners referred to in the Report, but we have to accept that those escapes took place. It is right to have recrimination about them and to ask why they happened. It is right to reserve decisions on procedure and to consider what changes should be made by the Home Office in conjunction with the Prison Service and the Prison Officers Association to ensure that such escapes are less frequent and to tighten up security wherever this can be done.
In the present state of the nation's economy, there is, so to speak, an element of competition: every section of the community thinks that it deserves a good or better reward or that it has an equal claim on the Treasury for the services which it rightly renders to the State. The tinker, the tailor, the candlestick maker, the bricklayer, the toolmaker, the carpenter—all these have great organisations to look after their interests. But the services which help us to conduct our civilised society present another problem. They, too, are now demanding, in equity, an equal share or a greater reward for the services which they perform.
It is instructive to look objectively at the kind of men who enter the services we are now considering, the police or the Prison Service, and why they do. It is incumbent upon the House to promote schemes of recruitment, promotion, reward and welfare which will strengthen that recruitment and retain it. That is where the Home Secretary will have his biggest fight with his Cabinet colleagues, and he will have to fight rather hard. He is in charge of two vital services—the police and the prison officers—which are responsible for the continuance of our fabric of civilisation. Our record in humane treatment in police supervision


and apprehension, and in the administration of justice, is good compared with other countries, but it could be improved in some ways.
It is the job of the House to digest the Mountbatten Report, which is a good report—concise, quickly gathered and quickly presented, dealing with the facts and leaving the arguments to be settled by the legislators. It makes recommendation on the future conduct of the service and it is for the Treasury to find the money. That is where the snags will arise. My right hon. Friend will have a fight on his hands both with the D.E.A. and the Prices and Incomes Board on the question of the just reward for prison officers.
Wormwood Scrubs is in my constituency. The prison officers there are a responsible body of men, and I do not receive many complaints from them. But one receives the occasional responsible letter pointing out the difficulties of maintaining morale in the service and the problem of the career structure, the rewards, the pension at the end of service, and the necessity for them to remain in the service and prevent wastage. That brings other problems. Any modern economic civilisation must look after its police, tax gatherers, and prison officers. What are we to do on some of the basic problems of pay to improve the prison officers' position.
Even today, my right hon. Friend has not accepted the Mountbatten Report in toto. He probably has reservations or is taking time to reconsider some of the proposals, some of which are very sweeping. There are several matters affecting the duties of prison officers, such as night patrols, where staff are not available, especially at Wormwood Scrubs, and the necessity for housing, which has been mentioned both by my right hon. Friend and the right hon. and learned Member for St. Marylebone.
I am concerned about the problems of continuance of service to the day of retirement, because when prison officers retire they must surrender the tenancy of their present house or flat. They have no great amount of capital available and no prospects of securing a house from a local authority. They are thrown on their own resources and are at the mercy of the housing situation.
That is why I ask my right hon. Friend to fight with his Cabinet colleagues, and he will have to fight very hard. It is important to have a scheme to increase recruitment, extend service to retirement, and improve morale. I would like him to open discussions with local authorities wherever prisons are sited to make some arrangement so that when a man has finished his prison service, when his family will be in their twenties and the need for accommodation is at its greatest, he shall have a place on the waiting list for a council house assessed on the years of his service.
Alternatively, my right hon. Friend could consider some kind of insurance policy, perhaps contributory, over and above the ordinary emoluments. I suggested such a scheme previously in regard to the police It would allow a man to take at the end of his service a capital sum which would place him in a favourable position in the housing market and would allow him to purchase a house on his retirement. It is not a big investment, spread over 20 to 35 years' service, and we should do well to consider that.
As the right hon. and learned Gentleman said, we are dealing with organised crime which is steadily and alarmingly growing year by year. The escapes from prison, on which I shall not dwell, show that there are highly organised, determined men with funds available to put their will into operation. I think that the case of Blake was the only escape in the history of any nation, at least in the Western world, organised for political reasons, and that is what is alarming. As I said in a Question to my right hon. Friend in October, the train robbers were one thing but a coldly calculated rescue for political reasons was another. The public was alarmed at the time.
Non-involvement of the public in dealing with crime is a steadily growing factor in British public life. There was a time when the public felt more responsibility towards the police in the exercise of their duties, but it is not apparent today. Violence is afoot, and violence of a wicked and destructive nature which knows no respect for age or person, young or old, and is prepared, possibly with the use of weapons, to take the


ultimate risk of killing in pursuit of its ends.
That is a new chapter in British crime. In turn, it imposes an additional strain on prison officers because it is in Category A that one will in future find the greatest number of prisoners. Therefore, the suggestions of the right hon. and learned Gentleman for the extension of the Prison Service and his request for a programme of new prisons are urgent and necessary. To judge from the attitide of the House today, my right hon. Friend will have full sympathy in his efforts to put the situation to rights as quickly as possible.
I now turn to the document which has been submitted to my right hon. Friend by the Prison Officers' Association, and the recommended scales of pay, promotion prospects and the new officers' status which it contains. The Association has accepted the Mountbatten Report in toto. Looking through it and the Circular sent by the Association, I see no reason why my right hon. Friend should not also go the full way. The service must be adequately manned. It is not the calling of just any kind of people; it requires a special person to volunteer for that type of service. It is my right hon. Friend's job to see that his status is commensurate to the risk and responsibilities involved and that the remuneration compares with that for work of a freer and more amiable nature performed by professions outside. If he does that, he will serve the interests of the whole country.
The Report is valuable; for the first time it gives some of us an insight into prison conditions, the service we would like to see and methods of escape. These detailed technical matters are best left in the hands of those who will be able to deal with them in the future, but the general outlook on the service—both towards the police and the prison officers—is a matter of urgent consideration.
As the right hon. and learned Member for St. Marylebone said, the biggest job now is to restore the confidence of the public, which was seeping away, and to show quite firmly that the Home Secretary is on top of the job, together with the police and prison officers, in regaining control of a situation which appeared to he slipping from our grasp.
If my right hon. Friend does that during his tenure of office, we will all wish him well. It is a job for which every Home Secretary has borne criticism. Indeed, the office has been called the graveyard of politicians. I hope that it will not be so in his case. I hope that he will accept the very responsible and constructive paper submitted by the Prison Officer's Association as well as the Mountbatten Report, and that he will also consider my suggestion of providing, by insurance or by some other way, a capital sum to enable prison officers to be able to purchase houses or flats on retirement or, alternatively, providing for their being able to accumulate points on local housing lists.
This applies not only to prison officers but to the police and long-serving soldiers. The British Army is run by its non-commissioned officers, but they do not get a lot of money and certainly do not come out with a fortune. If we are to maintain our essential services these are the sort of things we must think about. I know my right hon. Friend well enough to realise that he will give them serious consideration.

5.51 p.m.

Mr. W. F. Deedes: I think that I agree with practically everything the hon. Member for Hammersmith, North (Mr. Tomney) has said, and particularly with one remark—that the Home Secretary has a fight on his hands. It is for that reason that I am bound to say that I was a little disappointed by the right hon. Gentleman's speech. Like my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for St. Marylebone (Mr. Hogg), I do not want the Home Secretary to resign, and I am sure that he will not. But I find myself unable unreservedly to accept his rather bright picture of the Prison Service now in a happy state of vigorous—as he called it—implementation of the Mountbatten Report.
I think that the right hon. Gentleman would have given a more convincing picture of what should be done if he had been willing to accept a little more critically and frankly some of the difficulties we know that he has on his hands—difficulties which the public should be invited much more freely to share with him so that they may consider them for themselves and in general be a little more co-operative.


None of us dispute the ideals about which the right hon. Gentleman spoke. But they did not originate with his régime. For some of us they were strongly founded in the régime of Lord Butler at the Home Office. Some of us are entitled, however, to dispute the best means by which these ideas will be fulfilled. I do not think that any great purpose is to be derived from pursuing in detail the escapes of either Blake or Mitchell. If they represented anything, they were symptomatic of certain weaknesses in the system and are isolated scandals. It is not the least merit of the Mountbatten Report that it perceived this and went further than any of us expected when the inquiry was set up.
While I consider that the remit given to Lord Mountbatten in the circumstances was unfairly onerous, reflecting no credit on the Administration who had to throw the inquiry forward in this way, it has been brilliantly discharged. My only serious reservation is that work done, perforce, within two months should not be regarded as a blueprint for the future of the Prison Service. It is beyond human endeavour to provide in two months of rapid work all the thinking that we shall need in the course of the year or two ahead.
These principal escapes and the others which caused such interest over Christmas seem to have arisen through the concatenation of two circumstances, the one largely beyond our control and the other, I believe, attributable to serious mis-judgment. The first is what is described in the Report in paragraph 206 as
… the spectacular growth in the prison population in recent years.
This growth has largely negatived—more than negatived—the not inconsiderable building programme. About £34 million worth out of £42 million of the estimates has been completed in a decade.
How far this size of population in our prisons should have been foreseen is arguable. There has been a tendency—and we are all guilty—to talk optimistically about the crime rate and to believe that at any moment it will turn a corner, which it does not. There is room for doubt there, but there is no room for doubt about the consequences. We can see one consequence, and a grave one, in the Criminal Justice Bill. In that Bill,

we are having to reshape part of our system of justice in order to meet the exigencies of the prison administration. It is not unfair to say that magistrates and others are being required to revise former concepts of appropriate punishments not least because we have to economise on prison space.
Some people may say that there is nothing to take exception to in that but we must beware of it. We have always taken great care that the Executive should not influence the judiciary but have now been forced into the position where prison administration is influencing the judiciary. I shall not dwell on that, but we should take note of it.
The second situation, which I believe is attributable to serious misjudgment, is described in paragraph 202 of the Report, which says:
A constructive liberal prison regime and secure prisons are not necessarily incompatible, but conflicts will arise if an attempt is made to conduct a liberal regime in buildings designed in accordance with the 19th century philosophy of prison treatment.
What this really means to me is that we have allowed our ideals in prison reform to outpace the means that we are prepared to find in order to implement them. This is not new in public administration. Most of us live by this method. But when public security is involved it constitutes a grave misjudgment. It is a miscalculated risk. I think that it imposes a very unfair demand on the prison administration.
The right hon. Gentleman—deservedly, in my view—gets great credit for what can be regarded as an enlightened and liberal approach to penology. Yet, in some senses, the price has to be paid by those responsible for maintaining prison security. Between the ideals expounded by the right hon. Gentleman and what can be provided by way of a more liberal regime in prisons, a large gap exists. It has to be filled by the Prison Service itself, and it is grossly unfair that it should be blamed, even inadvertently, for failing to do it.
I thought that it was unfair of the right hon. Gentleman, as he did indirectly at Christmas time by a directive to prison governors, when many escapes were being made, to suggest by implication that they were falling down on the job. I am sure that that was not his intention, but the impression one got from the directive was


that they had better smarten themselves up. It was not their fault that the spate of escapes took place, and I am sure he accepts that.
It is not altogether surprising that in paragraph 17 of his Report, Lord Mountbatten says:
… I do not believe the morale of the Prison Service as a whole is as high as it should be.
The Prison Service is, within my knowledge, well aware of what is happening. They are conscious that unfair demands are being made on them from which, if all went well, the administration would derive a certain amount of credit. If things do not go well, then the prison administration carries the can.
So much for the general background. Before I turn to the constructive possibilities, there is one other matter on which perhaps we could be enlightened. I confess that I am in a state of confusion here. Lord Mountbatten reports:
There is no really secure prison in existence in this country.
I think that we knew that. However, what is surprising to me is why the plans for such a prison have not gone further.
Nearly two years ago, in the course of our proceedings on the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Bill, the right hon. Lady the Minister of State, Home Office, clearly said that a prison for very long term prisoners which would be extremely secure would be built in the Isle of Wight, that the Government were going ahead with that project, that plans were in hand and that it was hoped that it would not be too long before it was built. I am not clear whether this is the prison which has gone into the main block at Albany or the prison which should have been started but which was delayed until after the conclusion of the Mountbatten inquiry. I should like enlightenment on that. It must have been foreseen before Lord Mountbatten conducted his inquiry that there would be a need for a prison for long-term prisoners combining security with more comfortable conditions for long-term prisoners than are normally enjoyed.
I turn, perhaps more constructively, to what is perhaps the most important of Lord Mountbatten's recommendations. This is the proposal to divide prisoners into four categories—A, B, C and D.

This is right. What I question is whether Lord Mountbatten and his team or the Government fully comprehended what would be required to implement this very important proposal. It cannot be done by drawing names out of hats. Lord Mountbatten says little more than that the proper machinery must be set up to ensure that prisoners are allocated to the correct category. He does not return to it in the other paragraphs on prison security save indirectly in paragraphs 211 and 218.
I regard classification as absolutely central to the regime which I hope will come about through the Report. It is a science, and a constant science. The best examples which I have seen in Europe and America suggest that it is the most expensive part of prison administration. I saw not long ago a reception guidance centre in the southern part of the State of California where an expert staff of about 100 people of diverse gifts was required to look after a population of approximately 600. The time spent in classifying and diagnosing the prisoners and deciding to which prison they should most appropriately be sent occupied about 90 days.
I know that we have an arrangement of that kind in this country. I am not clear how many prisoners have been subjected to it. There is a refinement, namely presentence reports for judges, which the same institution, if properly organised, can provide. Incidentally, it may also ensure, which we are not ensuring now, that cases involving mental health which have slipped through can be picked out and appropriately dealt with.
Classification does not end there. As Lord Mountbatten observes in a later paragraph,
The allocation of prisoners to the categories I have described needs to be kept under continuous review and subjected to careful research to ensure that allocations arc being made correctly.
Therefore, there will have to be posting and cross-posting later. This diagnosis is unending and it is an essential concomitant of the more liberal and enlightened régime to which the Home Secretary has pinned his colours. I do not think that this régime can be secured by asking too much of the prison building programme or of our prison administration. It must be increasingly secured by the continuous


scientific evaluation of prison inmates. This will be very expensive. It is difficult to achieve it at cut prices. It is indispensable to probation and parole. It seems to me in every sense the only secure road to a more liberal régime.
We should not fool ourselves about this. It is plain nonsense to assert, as it was asserted last year, that prison escapes are part of the price which must be paid for more enlightened penal policies. That is rationalising mismanagement. It is a most foolish doctrine because it is calculated to harden public opposition to the sort of enlightened steps which we should be taking. I do not think that the public are unjust or foolish about this. They have a very fair balance in their minds. They know very well that it does not make sense to go on talking about the war against crime, the need to strengthen the hands of the police and to ensure that the guilty do not escape justice, and, at the same time, to plead that we must accept a proportion of escapes as the price of penal reform.
This has an even more important effect on the morale of the prison service. The structure of this service must be considered much more carefully than Lord Mountbatten had time to do. I am not sure that in the long term the aim should not be an inter-related service—I do not say integrated—through the whole field of what the United States call corrections—in other words, breaking down to a degree the present watertight compartments between prison officers, probation officers, parole officers and the kindred services. These bodies will have to be extended and expanded.
Why should not prison officers be eligible to transfer to these services more freely? This would widen the scope of promotion, encourage men of quality who have an inclination for the public service and prevent the institutionalisation of prison officers. I hope that thought will be given to that matter.
Lastly, I echo what my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for St. Marylebone said about the Home Secretary's own organisation in the Home Office. It is no reflection on the Civil Service or anybody else to say that it is not right. The Mountbatten Report makes it clear that it is not right. At the time, I was strongly opposed to the

transfer of the Prison Commission to the Home Office. I thought it a mistake, and I think now that it was a mistake. It is no reflection on people in the present set-up, but the sort of appointments and transfers made in the light of Lord Mountbatten's Report will not of themselves provide the sort of service which we had in the Prison Commission under people like Sir Lionel Fox some years ago. I accept we cannot go back to that.
The Home Secretary, however, is confronted with a real difficulty—the same difficulty which he faces in respect of the police. The top echelon, the general staff, is not yet broadly enough based to discharge its new and very large responsibilities. That is not simply my view; it is also Lord Mountbatten's view. In paragraphs 236 to 238 he refers to the growing complexity" of the problem and goes on to speak about the difficulties of combining the functions of the professional advisers to the Home Secretary and the administration of the prison service. These difficulties will not be met by appointing strong-looking men designed to create a good public appearance. The Home Secretary must recast his general staff and its system of communications with the establishment.
Let us tell people more of what is going on. There is a case for telling people far more about our prisons and what we are trying to do. The Home Office—and I speak as a former inmate and great friend—is still far too security-minded. It is perfectly true that cameras and reporters have gone into prisons whereas they would not have gone in a year or two ago. In a sense, however, that only obscures what is not being disclosed.
Bold, fascinating and most acceptable experiments are going on in penology. They may not succeed, but that is no reason why they should be kept a dark secret until we know positively whether they will work. If the public were to share this knowledge, it would enlist a great deal more public sympathy. People would not lose their nerve by being told that men were being released in certain circumstances during their sentence to assist them in certain ways. There is far more likelihood of panic among the public when people discover something has gone wrong with an experiment of which they


know nothing. Let the public feel involved in what is going on, and let the prisoner feel that the public are involved, because at least one consequence would be that the transition of a man back to a normal life of work was considerably eased. My last word, therefore, is to ask the Home Secretary for more light.

6.11 p.m.

Mr. Richard Crawshaw: I am glad to have the opportunity of taking part in this debate because this is one of the most important subjects which we have debated for some time. I was particularly impressed by the speech of the right hon. and learned Member for St. Marylebone (Mr. Hogg), which was not only powerful, but very interesting. It limits, however, what one can say afterwards, because the right hon. and learned Gentleman has said so much of what one would wish to say. In paying tribute to the right hon. and learned Gentleman, I would like to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary for accepting the Report. My right hon. Friend was rather limited by reason of the fact that he has to find the money for these things, whereas the right hon. and learned Gentleman does not.
These reforms cannot be bought on the cheap. It is a question not of whether we can afford the money, but whether we can afford not to find it. To reform one person could save the country many thousands of pounds in the years to come, and yet we spend so much time on keeping prisoners in the conditions of which we have heard today with so little reformation.
I do not agree with the right hon. Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes) that the Criminal Justice Bill is being twisted to keep people out of prison because we cannot find places for them In my view, too many people have been kept in prison over the years who should never have gone to prison in the first place.
I believe that it is necessary to categorise prisoners the moment they start imprisonment. I cannot, however, see why it is necessary to have four categories as given in the Report. I agree that Category A is essential and that the public must be protected from certain people. The nation must be protected from certain people such as spies. In that regard, it is necessary to have high security

prisons. The other classes of prisoners, however, need not be divided into more than two categories.
The ordinary category would denote a person who went to an open prison. It will be said that these people will escape, but I think that the reason why they escape is that in doing so they lose so little. If these were many privileges that prisoners could acquire but which would automatically be taken away from them in stages if they escaped or committed an offence, I believe that prisoners would respect these rules and would not wish to lose their privileges. In this respect they would not need the close security which is exercised today.
I know that many people disagree with me. There are those who say that prison would be made so attractive that prisoners would like it. I have always believed that there were three purposes in putting people into prison: punishment, the protection of society and the reformation of the wrongdoer.
If I had to choose from those three, I would put reformation first and punishment last. It is necessary to protect the public and this would be done, if necessary, by putting prisoners into a category A prison. After that, every effort must be made at reformation. This cannot be done by keeping people in prison under the conditions which many of us knew existed and which the Report highlights—conditions of degradation, with men going into prison for what might be termed a trivial offence in comparison with most people who are in prison and from which, because of close association for long hours in cells, they come out knowing all the tricks of the trade and bent on a criminal career, as well as men who go into prison and who come out as homosexuals. These are the things to which we should be paying more attention rather than considering how we can make our prisons more secure.
The privileges which I have in mind and which would enable authority to be kept include tobacco. We know that in many prisons the tobacco barons have tremendous power. In some prisons in America, people are allowed to smoke as much as they wish. Why should not they smoke as much as they like if they buy the cigarettes from the pay they receive for doing honest work in prison?


Why should not prisoners be allowed to receive as many letters from their wives as they wish or be able to send letters home? What better pastime could there be for a prisoner than to sit down at night and write a letter to his wife? I do not believe that the existing petty restrictions in these ways serve the cause of the nation or of the man in prison. One could list many privileges which people could have in open prisons but which would automatically be taken away from them in stages if they contravened authority.
There will. of course, be people who, no matter how many privileges can be taken away, will still try to escape. For this reason there should be a third category of prison—not a maximum security prison, but a closed prison from which a man who was determined to escape would do so, but where nevertheless the conditions would make it difficult for him to escape.
It might be necessary to send a man to that type of prison when he is first sentenced, because for the first week or so a prisoner suffers from a great sense of grievance and during that period he might attempt to escape whereas on reflection a week or so later he would put the idea behind him. It may be necessary, therefore, to keep him in one of these closed prisons for the first week or two after he is sentenced.
I believe that these three categories would be workable. A prisoner would respond because a certain degree of trust was being placed in him. I believe that such an arrangement would work, because so many fewer people would be required to look after our prison service. What is even more important is that the conditions in which prison officers work would be made much more tolerable than they are today.
I do not believe that any man, however humane, can go into the prison service and enforce the regulations and conditions which have to be applied without something happening to his character. It is essential for the prison service also that these things should be done. Furthermore, if the farsighted policy which my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is determined to carry out is backed by sufficient finance, we will eventually save money. It would cost something in the

beginning, but we would save in the long run.
My next point concerns the work which people do in prison. I do not accept the assertions of the right hon. and learned Member for St. Marylebone that it is not possible to have factories attached to prisons. I believe that it is possible, and it must be made possible. While I consider, however, that we should be lenient in many respects with prisoners, I do not believe in being soft with them. Not only is it essential to maintain their morale in prison by giving them honest and genuine work to do by means of which they can earn money to send to their families with which to buy extra things, but it is equally important that prisoners get into the way of working. Many hon. Members will know that the tendency today is that the less people do, the less they want to do.
That does not apply only to the criminal class but to every class in society that the less one does the less one wants to do. It is essential to find some means to employ these people for long hours. I do not say that they should work a 40—hour week. There should be some punishment in prison; I do not say that everything should be turned in favour of the prisoner. But we must find some means of doing this kind of thing because at present when a man comes out of prison no matter what he was like when he went in he has lost the will to work.
It is essential that from an early stage in prison a man should be allowed to go home for a weekend every so often. This should be one of the privileges. I know that people will say that they will enjoy being in prison. Some people fail to realise that when a man is sentenced to prison not only is he being punished but his wife and family also and in most cases they are completely innocent. As a result often another man goes into the prison and tells Tom Snooks that his wife has been seen going around with another man. The prisoner concerned might have been completely settled in prison and determined to finish his sentence there but in those circumstances it requires a very strong character for a man not to seek to leave prison, to go home to find what is happening.
I found how this affects a man in an incident which occurred during the war. A man who was going home on leave for


a week came to me and said that his wife was desperately ill and he did not intend to come back after his week's leave. He told me this because he did not want to let me down. Inquiries were made and it was found that the facts were as he stated and facilities were made for him to have an extended leave. But how many men take that line in such a situation? If it is question of his wife and family suffering such a man will not pay any regard to the penalties concerned but he will go home to see what is happening there.
The welfare services in prison must be tremendously extended. A man must be able to confide to others the difficulties he is experiencing with his family so that welfare officers can make arrangements for him to go home. Many people will say that this is being soft to the prisoner. I know that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary appreciates the point I am making. I believe that the purpose of a sentence is reformation, not punishment. Punishment is incidental to it. If we could have this enlightened system in which the State could show mercy and prison officers could show compassion and consideration which ultimately leads to hope for the prisoner we should have a Prison Service which we could admire and not one which is degrading and of which we are heartily ashamed.

6.25 p.m.

Mr. Michael Hamilton: That was a very humane and sincere speech by the hon. Member for Liverpool, Toxteth (Mr. Crawshaw). Many hon. Members taking part in this debate have large prisons in their constituencies. I cannot make that claim, but I can make the bold claim that the prison system as we know it today emanated from my constituency.
Originally, of course, the castle dungeon served as a convenient place of detention, but with early crime waves and the increase of population, special arrangements had to be made for the care of offenders.
Three miles east of Salisbury, there are the ruins of what is called Clarendon Palace. It was a Royal palace similar in date to Westminster Palace, but in a more salubrious setting. From there a

complete overhaul of the administration of justice took place. From there the order went out directing the building of gaols in the counties and boroughs all over the kingdom. The orders were called the Constitutions of Clarendon, and the buildings went up. Parliament did not debate prison escapes at that time; the prisoners stayed in.
I have read every page and paragraph of the Mountbatten Report. It is a very impressive Report. I found it in many ways a brilliant Report; yet, in other ways, I found it curiously unsatisfying. I like the way in which it is quick, direct, to the point, never boring, never turgid. It was an amazing feat that in the short space of two months Lord Mountbatten should have visited 17 separate prisons and interviewed scores of witnesses from whom evidence was taken, including three former Home Secretaries. That all this evidence should have been sifted, weighed and the conclusions drawn in so short a time was a tremendous achievement.
I was also extremely pleased that this Report praises the Prison Service as it does, and the devotion to duty of the service. The difficulty of its work shines from every page of the Report and it is something of which the general public needs to be reminded. I also liked the tribute paid indirectly to Lord Butler. It was he who started the greatest prison building programme of this century. The Report refers to the fact that £34 million has been spent since 1956 and says:
… drive has been put behind the building programme".
I remember visiting one of Lord Butler's newest security borstals and being very much impressed. They are far finer buildings than those of any English public school. I was particularly struck by the fact that there were two chapels, one for Roman Catholic boys and one for Church of England boys. I thought that extravagant use of the taxpayers' money, but since I have come to see that, with the wise political touch as Home Secretary which Lord Butler always showed, this decision was right.
It emerges from this Report that the crime rate and the population are rising so rapidly that we are able to keep pace, but certainly no more. I noticed that today the Home Secretary talked about using Army camps. We are not achieving sufficient rebuilding to get rid of the early


Victorian prisons. The Home Secretary told us perfectly rightly that Dartmoor was built during the early Napoleonic Wars to house French prisoners of war in 1806, but it was in the middle of the century that the Victorians showed themselves to be the great builders they were. Pentonville, a model prison was opened in 1842. Armley, at Leeds, was built in 1847 for 350 men and today houses nearer 1,000. Wandsworth was opened in 1851 and Holloway in the following year. All these prisons in their day were admirable and served their purposes supremely well. But the Report makes clear that they constitute a very difficult legacy today, and a complete rebuilding of all these Victorian prisons would cost us more than £100 million. If that is not practicable, and clearly it is not, then at least we are not burdening our successors 100 years hence with the problem which we have today, which is of a set of prisons almost all built at the same date, designed to meet a need which in 100 years will have changed.
I think that the Report is right, in that first things must come first. This new maximum security prison in the Isle of Wight must come first, but I find myself wondering whether Lord Mountbatten realises that the wall at Everthorpe Hall cost 10 per cent. of the total cost of the building? It cost £65,000 and is 18 ft. high, and yet here in this Report Lord Mountbatten is advocating on the Isle of Wight a perimeter wall over 1 mile long and 36 ft. high. I think that money is needed and it must be spent, but the taxpayer must have value for money and 1 rather wish that the Report had dwelt a little longer on the desirability of selling existing prison sites and using the proceeds for further fresh building elsewhere. I think that more could have been made of this, and if legislation for it is needed let us have it.
1 promised to be brief. Why, then, is this Report in some ways so unsatisfying? We read in it about Blake, Mitchell, Biggs and Wilson. We put the Report down after reading the 93 pages and we ask, "Who, then, was responsible?" The answer is everybody and nobody, and this coming from an Admiral of the Fleet rather surprised me.
There is, after all, in the Royal Navy a clear chain of command. If a valuable

naval vessel is entrusted to an individual officer, and if the vessel is damaged, the officer is sent for. Responsibility is clearly defined. Nobody questions the definition, and if something goes wrong somebody is responsible.
We see Blake described in the Report as "no ordinary spy". It was known that in terms of national security and of international relations his safe keeping was more important than any naval vessel. He was a major security risk, yet his escape from Wormwood Scrubs on a Saturday evening, in the words of the Report, "was easily accomplished". It is true that the Report mentions that there were four occasions when Home Secretaries might have had him transferred from Wormwood Scrubs. It is also true that the Governor recommended his transfer in January, 1966, but the fact remains that he got out, and got out easily. I use the words of the Report.
The impression given to me by this Report is that it was "one of those things". We are told that our prisons are insecure, and, unless we revert to the old inhuman methods, escapes will continue. I confess that I had hoped that an Admiral of the Fleet might have recommended the establishment of a clearer chain of responsibility and that he might have grafted on to the Prison Service something of his naval ideas. But no. If more escape tomorrow, it will be nobody's fault.
The Home Secretary ended his speech with a fine piece of Churchillian prose. Perhaps I can finish mine by quoting a single sentence from The Times of today, to bear out my point about responsibility. There is a sentence which occurs in a letter written by the Deputy Leader of the Opposition. It says:
… these policies are damaging to the nation, not only because of the money they waste, not only because they divert resources from other more important purposes, but because they consistently blur the edge of individual responsibility.
I think this is what the Report is in danger of doing.

6.36 p.m.

Miss Joan Lestor: It would be very tempting this afternoon to follow the thread set by the right hon. and learned Member for St. Marylebone (Mr. Hogg) in dealing with the whole


question of retribution and rehabilitation, because one cannot separate a discussion on security in prisons from the whole aspect of and our outlook towards the question of what we do with people who offend against the law. Unfortunately, everything that we have to say about this must come within the confines of the matter which we are discussing, and although, like many hon. Members who have spoken in this debate, I have serious misgivings about perpetuating a prison system which carries with it so many outmoded concepts and ideas, I want it to be clearly understood that what I have to say is for the moment within the confines of this Report, and in the hope of shedding a little light into the darkness which exists among the attitudes which are prevalent about the whole of our prison system.
I was very interested in one of the points made by the right hon. and learned Gentleman. He picked out as an omission from the Report that the factor which was common to many of the prisoners who had escaped was that they had some organisation behind them; that they were able to have an escape prepared for them because they had something to go out to. I should like to tell the right hon. Gentleman, because I think he will be interested to hear this, that this aspect of the matter was part of the evidence presented to the Mountbatten Inquiry by the Howard League for Penal Reform.
One thing about the Report which struck me was that many of the people about whom the inquiry reports not only had that in common, but that many of them were serving incredibly long sentences, the sort of sentence which it is becoming common for society to impose on particular types of offenders: Biggs—30 years; Blake—42 years; Wilson—30 years. I shall say something about this later, but I hope that when the debate is concluded the Home Secretary will comment on this, because it seems obvious to me at least that whatever the rights or wrongs of the situation, if we are now going to embark on a method of punishment which means that we tell a man that he is to be deprived of his freedom for 30 or 40 years, it will be reasonable to assume that he will try to escape. This seems to me to be fairly obvious.
If we are dealing with a man or a woman who is deprived of freedom for five, six, or seven years, the situation is completely different. But if one considers Blake—I do not want to go into this in detail—or the conditions surrounding anybody who is imprisoned for that length of time, it seems obvious that the whole organisation of our prisons and our attitude to the man who is put in prison for that length of time are things about which we have not begun to think, to decide the best way in which we can deal with such a person.
This has as much relevance to the Report as has the point already made, that many prisoners are backed by strong organisations who arrange their escape. I profoundly disagree with the hon. Member for Liverpool, Toxteth (Mr. Crawshaw), who said that it was only necessary to classify prisoners into one or two categories. This has been our big mistake. We do not classify our prisoners sufficiently. We have not yet devised a system of classification making clear the type of person with whom we are dealing, and the treatment best suited to them. Once we get down to such a system we shall begin to move away from the concept of retribution which many of us abhor, and we shall be able to move toward the concept of rehabilitation.
It might be useful to distinguish, as has been hinted at, between prisoners who will escape simply as a demonstration, or because it is the only method of challenging some of the prisons, or because they have somewhere to escape to. We can also begin to classify people in terms of types and offences. The Report goes on to talk about a maximum security prison and the need to isolate from society people who will be dangerous should they escape or those whom it is undesirable should escape. The attitudes existing within such a prison must be different from those in a prison where one is dealing with men and women who have offended in a particular way, or who perhaps, are in need of a different type of treatment.
I am very much interested in the whole of prison life and the Prison Service. There should be more classification and breaking down of the types of people with whom we are trying to deal, in order to determine whether there is a need for punishment, rehabilitation or


merely a need to keep undesirable people, potentially dangerous, away from members of society. Over and above this consideration there is the question of whether disturbed and mentally abnormal prisoners with long sentences should be kept with what one might call normal people who are effective and successful criminals.
The treatment and the attitude towards these people must be different. The Home Secretary has accepted the suggestion to have a maximum security prison, and, although 1 can see the wisdom of this, my worry is that if one tries to devise a system of security, making it absolutely impossible for anyone to escape, the system may become too rigid and security-minded. This would be bound to militate against the efforts of people working within the prison service, wanting to make people ready to return to the outside world and take their place in society. Even long-term prisoners will eventually return to society. If they are not to relax into total despondence, hopelessness, and revert to what they were before they came in, any maximum security prison engaged in keeping people shut off from society for a long time must incorporate within it ways and means of treating people and helping them to return to a normal society.
The more that one isolates people the more this militates against their taking their place in society. I was glad to note that the idea of a maximum security prison on a remote island was dismissed by the Mountbatten Inquiry. It is obvious that it cannot fulfil its function in trying to rehabilitate people and make them part of society once more. One of the reasons why Dartmoor is such an unpopular place with prison staff is because it is so isolated. It produces so many difficulties that the staff must become disspirited and irritated, because they are so cut off.
If there is to be a maximum security prison it must be, of necessity, a small prison. It is much better to have small institutions than large ones. No one can stress sufficiently the small paragraph dealing with hygiene and the references to the tensions which build up within a system when three men are confined together in a cell under those conditions. Perhaps they do not like each other: perhaps they have nothing in common

with one another. The tensions which build up under those circumstances must be an added incentive for people to escape.
No one who has read the Report can run away with the idea, which one hears so often, that our prisons are like second and third-rate holiday camps. This is rubbish. Anything that we do now, through the Criminal Justice Bill, and so forth, to try to reduce the number of people coming into prisons must be a good thing, in so far as it will reduce the prison population. Although the number of escapes has been exaggerated, escapes over the last 10 years have risen, but so has the prison population. Unless we take drastic steps to reduce it, we shall for ever be chasing our tail and getting nowhere.
I have given a great deal of thought to long-term sentences and, having abolished the death penalty, I hope permanently, and embarked upon a situation where, for murder and other crimes against society, we will give people long prison sentences, I believe that we are entering a completely new era for the treatment of people, particularly for indeterminate sentences. Part of the incentive for not breaking out of prison is that one knows that if one behaves reasonably well, one will earn a certain amount of remission.
If people are to be in prison for 30 or 40 years, this incentive goes. Unless one questions, as I do, the wisdom of very long prison sentences, except in terms of danger to the community, and unless one can substitute it with real work and rehabilitation, one can expect people to try to escape. A 42—year sentence on Blake did not deter Vassall.
The whole concept of what deters people needs to be examined. Most people interested in the subject know that, under present circumstances, one is unlikely to rehabilitate a person sentenced to six or seven years. By then it is too late; the whole system of running down the individual has taken place. One can only do this rehabilitation in a shorter period of time. If there are to be long prison sentences, which will not rehabilitate people, one must think again.
In our Prison Service and crime prevention, we are not using our labour in the most economical way. We have


limited resources and need more recruits for the police and prison services. The Report deals with this. One of the difficulties is that we are using much of our resources to keep people in prison for long periods and not enough to impress on those who offend against the law that they are likely to be caught.
One of the reasons for the rising crime rate is that a person can weigh up the odds on being caught. If he is less likely to be caught, he is more likely to commit the crime and vice versa. We cannot separate our attitudes to society and people who break the law, whether by violence or any other means, from what is in the Report and our whole attitude to prison reform and preventive work.
The right hon. and learned Member for St. Marylebone questioned the concepts of prisons and how we treat people. This would be a fitting subject for debate and I hope that we may one day debate what is happening in our prisons. We know that financial resources are limited, but if we spent more on housing and education, we might be doing more to prevent crime. Anyone who has worked in the children's service, as I have, and has been a chairman of a children's committee, has felt the apprehension which comes with the knowledge of the deprivation, indignities and misery which some young people suffer in their early years through all sorts of difficulties which one cannot go into.
One knows that it is those people who will be called criminals and punished in 20 years' time. This is outside the debate, but if a little more of our resources were directed to that object, we might reduce our prison population and get a more enlightened attitude to the treatment of people who offend against the law.

6.53 p.m.

Mr. James Dance: Morale and recruitment in the Prison Service are absolutely vital. This is borne out by paragraph 223 of the Mountbatten Report:
Despite the handicaps under which the Prison Service is working, morale appeared to me to be surprisingly high in the prisons I visited, though naturally I have received a number of letters which indicate that this is not universal, and this is also the view of some prison officers I have talked to.
There is a remand home and a Borstal in my constituency and I have had fairly

close contact with prison officers. Their morale is amazing, but they are dubious about one or two matters.
We live in an age of violence and crime, and our only protection is the strength of our Police Force and the deterrent effect of severe sentences. We all remember the Home Secretary overriding a sentence of birching passed by a magistrate on a young criminal convicted of violence against prison warders and police officers during a riot in the prison. He was serving a life sentence for murder. I do not say that birching is the correct answer, but the right hon. Gentleman must surely advance some alternative to protect warders and police officers from this kind of violence.
We all acknowledge that a strong, efficient and well-paid Police and Prison Service is necessary to control crime. We urgently need more policemen on the beat and many more warders, but we are not recruiting them in the right way. I fear that we are putting too much stress on the views of psychiatrists. A police inspector friend of mine told me that many policemen thought that during their training psychiatrists should spend one year as warders in a prison, which would give them a much more balanced idea of the kind of people they are dealing with.
As the hon. Member for Hammersmith, North (Mr. Tomney) said, we have not enough police officers. At Winson Green there is a shop equipped by a firm in my constituency, Harris Brush Works, which employs a large number of prisoners. One of the snags is that, because of lack of warders to supervise, they work very short hours, which is not satisfactory to them or to the people who are encouraging them to do this kind of work. The firm tries as far as possible to take these people into its factory at Bromsgrove when they are released. They are doing a first-class job. More warders are needed to supervise this kind of work.
Another important factor, which was raised by the hon. Member for Hammersmith, North, is housing for prison officers when they retire. A prison officer came to see me a month ago when he was due for retirement and said that his problem was that, although he had served at Winson Green and the remand home in my constituency, he was on no housing list. This is a very important matter.


These men and their wives, who have served the country so well for a long time, should have some form of security when they retire.
I am very glad that the Home Secretary has returned, because I should like to cross swords with him. On 26th January, I asked him:
whether, in view of the fact that there are not totally secure prisons in this country, he will now consider recommending the installation of high-voltage electric fences round the perimeters of Her Majesty's prisons, following the Mountbatten Report.
The right hon. Gentleman answered:
No, Sir. Apart from any other considerations, the hon. Member is under a misapprehension if he thinks this was recommended by Lord Mountbatten."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 26th January, 1967; Vol. 740, c. 1758.]
But my point is that the Home Secretary——

ROYAL ASSENT

6.58 p.m.

Message to attend the Lords Commissioners:

The House went:—and, having returned;

Mr. SPEAKER reported the Royal Assent to:

1. Consolidated Fund Act, 1967.
2. Education Act, 1967.
3. West Indies Act, 1967.
4. London Government Act, 1967.
5. London Bridge Act, 1967.

PRISON ESCAPES AND SECURITY

Question again proposed.

7.15 p.m.

Mr. Dance: You will remember, Mr. Speaker, that I was crossing swords with the Home Secretary and perhaps for clarification I ought to read out the Question again. I asked him
whether, in view of the fact that there are not totally secure prisons in this country, he will now consider recommending the installation of high-voltage electric fences round the perimeters of Her Majesty's prisons, following the Mountbatten Report.
The Home Secretary's reply was:

No, Sir. Apart from any other considerations, the hon. Member is under a misapprehension if he thinks this was recommended by Lord Mountbatten
But that was not the point I was making. The Mountbatten Report had said that there were not totally secure prisons and I was suggesting that we should take what steps we could to ensure that they were as secure as possible. I suggested electric fences because I thought that there might be something in the idea. I am not saying that I was completely right, but I got the brush-off when I put it to the right hon. Gentleman that
It is his own feather-bedding of the criminal classes that has done so much to undermine the morale of police and prison officers and to raise the rate of crime, on his own admission, to an all-time record level".
The right hon. Gentleman's reply was to say that it was a pity that I should have
tabled a Question apparently based either upon a misreading or a non-reading of a most important Report …".—[OFFICIAL REPORT. 26th January, 1967; Vol. 739, c. 1758.]
That was rather unfair of the right hon. Gentleman, because an hon. Member cannot come back with a second supplementary question and so I had to sit there and look a complete idiot.

Mr. Jenkins: Now that the hon. Gentleman has put it so charmingly I hesitate to interrupt him on this occasion at some length, but I want to indicate that my reply was what it was because the words "following the Mountbatten Report" appeared to indicate that this had been one of the recommendations. With the greatest respect to the hon. Gentleman, confronted with 52 recommendations from Lord Mountbatten after two months' study, I would prefer to study those rather than make a study of one of the hon. Gentleman's recommendations without two months' study.

Mr. Dance: That is fair enough, but I wanted to make the point that in a way this came within the scope of the Mountbatten recommendations when Lord Mountbatten said:
I recommend there should be an immediate survey of all perimeter walls.
In other words, he was saying that security of the perimeter walls was one of the great problems and I was trying to be helpful with my suggestion.
My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for St. Marylebone (Mr. Hogg),


with whom I agree so much, was perfectly right to say that criminals must be put into different categories and that an extremely violent and potentially dangerous man must be in a category different from that of others. Something has to be done to protect the public against very dangerous criminals who are a menance if they get out of prison.
I must be fair and say that I am one of those who signed the Motion asking for the Home Secretary's resignation. I sincerely hope that he will listen to the points made today. I am all for humanitarian treatment in prisons, but we can have too much feather-bedding of the bad and violent criminal, and I hope that in future the Home Secretary will take a more positive and powerful stand on that issue.

7.15 p.m.

Mr. Eric S. Heifer: Among many enlightened speeches today we have had two particularly enlightened speeches from the Front Benches. Anyone who has been present throughout the debate and who has heard my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and the right hon. and learned Member for St. Marylebone (Mr. Hogg) will know that on both sides of the House there are hon. Members deeply concerned with trying to find the solution to the problems of penal reform. I was fascinated by some of the proposals of the right hon. and learned Gentleman and I sincerely hope that at some time we can have a debate solely about how we intend to treat criminals in future and to answer the question of what else we can do except to put them into the existing buildings which we call prisons.
One of the country's very large prisons is in my constituency, Walton Prison. Obviously, as my right hon. Friend said, we cannot be concerned only with security, although I want to say something about security and some other aspects of prison life. I want especially to deal with sanitary conditions. My right hon. Friend the Minister of State knows that I have put a number of Questions to her during the last two and a half years about sanitary conditions in prisons generally and in Walton in particular.
Walton has had many famous prisoners. One of the most famous was Brendan Behan who wrote "Borstal Boy". Con-

ditions are no different now from what they were when Brendan Behan wrote these words in his fascinating book. He said:
Mornings, we were wakened at six"—
I do not say that prisoners are still awakened at six—
and slopped out throwing the contents of the chamber-pot into the bucket brought round by the prisoner appointed to this position. There was competition for the job because the same man brought round the breakfast.
There was competition for it because he might be able to "nick" a bit more for himself.
Then we went down to the recess with an enamel jug and got water for washing. There was only one lavatory on each landing and it was impossible to get in and use it, with another thirty or forty fellows queueing for water for washing, and rinsing round the bottom of the chamberpots to get out what had not gone into the big slop-bucket.
This was in the winter, of course. He went on:
All the time it was cold and black. In the morning the slate floor was freezing cold, and over the whole huge wing was a cold smell of urine and bad air, like a refrigerated lavatory.
Having read "Borstal Boy", I visited Walton Prison thinking that the conditions could not be anything like those described in the book. The sanitary arrangements, I thought, must have improved. But they had not. In the years since Brendan Behan had left the prison—he had been a political prisoner, a member of the I.R.A., and had not been sent there because he was a thief or anything of that sort—nothing had changed. I visited Walton Prison again recently and I again looked at the sanitary arrangements. Hon. Members will be interested to hear that they are still exactly the same.
We have spent a great deal of money in trying to improve Walton Prison. A new hospital block has been built and I agree that that is an improvement. However, should we go on wasting a great deal of money—and it is a waste—on buildings of this kind, buildings which cannot be adapted to modern ideas and techniques? Instead of wasting money in this way, we should push ahead even faster with the building of new prisons outside urban areas so that new ideas and techniques to improve the lot of the prisoner can be implemented.


Walton Prison is overcrowded. Conditions there are bad, not only for the prisoners but for those in the Prison Service. If men are forced to work in these conditions they cannot have good relations with the prisoners. I am not criticising anybody for this state of affairs. Three men must live in a small cell. Criminals are bound to be bred in such conditions. Some people have been sent to Walton Prison—I am sure that this applies to other prisons—although they have not been the sort of criminals with whom we are particularly concerned. But they have come out criminals. Under the law as it stands, people can be imprisoned for all sorts of reasons. Hardened criminals are often bred in prison and we must, therefore, do our utmost to get rid of these out-of-date buildings.
Much has been said about making prisons more secure, but is this possible? I agree that steps must be taken to ensure greater security, but many of the buildings inside our present old prisons reach the perimeter walls. In one recent case five prisoners escaped from Walton Prison because of circumstances such as these. The carpenters' shop extended not only to the perimeter wall but beyond it. There were plenty of tools available in the carpenters' shop and the prisoners merely had to walk through a door into the building which lay outside the wall. One ingenious prisoner, using the tools at his disposal, cut a hole in the wall and five prisoners went through it.
Much has been said about prisoners receiving help from outside to make good their escape. On this occasion help from outside was not needed. Indeed, one of the chaps later said, "What would you do? There was a hole staring me in the face, so naturally I went through it". Of course he did. He would have been a model prisoner indeed if he had not, particularly as it was a couple of days before Christmas.
I do not blame anybody for the present state of affairs. These old buildings are the cause of the trouble. Even if flash-lighting were introduced, it would be impossible, certainly at Walton, to have complete security because so many of the buildings extend right to the perimeter walls. The shadows cast by these buildings would make any form of flash or floodlighting almost pointless.
The answer is to use the interim period, between now and the time when sufficient new prisons are built outside urban areas—and we are likely to have a considerable wait—to devise methods which will ensure the best security possible. I hope that prisons will not be placed in places like Dartmoor. Prisoners should not be cast away in such isolated conditions. However, there must be a greater measure of security, if only because the people living near prisons such as Walton suffer great anxiety when there is a break-out. The escapee may not be violent, but the fact that an escape has taken place causes alarm. There must, therefore, be the maximum possible security.
I hope that my right hon. Friend will not accept suggestions like those put forward by the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Mr. Dance). The very thought of electric fences appalls me. I suggest that in addition to increasing the patrols by day and night inside the perimeter walls, there should be additional patrols outside the walls, perhaps by the police, although I appreciate that the Police Force is also short of staff. This may not be a practical suggestion, but I trust that my right hon. Friend will consider it. We cannot hope to solve the problem while we must make do with the old buildings which we call prisons. It would be better for my constituents if Walton Prison were removed and the land used for housing. We have a very serious housing problem in Liverpool.
There are many facets of this problem which I should like to discuss, but many hon. Members would like to contribute to the debate and I will not delay the House. I normally profoundly disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith, North (Mr. Tomney) when debating these issues, particularly when he urges the return of capital punishment. However, I agree with him that consideration should be given to the case of the prison officer who retires, although this does not apply only to prison officers. In my constituency we have a large hospital and when the deputy matron recently retired she had nowhere to live.
It is a scandal that people who give years of service to the community, as prison officers, hospital staff and others do, are not given special consideration when they retire, particularly if their


living accommodation is tied to their jobs. We should try to persuade local authorities to reach an agreement with the Home Office to solve this problem, particularly the housing problem faced by people when they retire. I appreciate, of course, that not all prison officers will want to live in council houses when they retire and that some of them may wish to find their own accommodation. It is an important point, because it may be that one of the reasons why it is difficult at times to recruit people is that they fear what may happen to them when they retire.
So far, this has been a remarkably interesting and fascinating debate. As a result of it, I hope that we shall not in future find ourselves involved in a great deal of hot air about prison escapes, with people tabling Motions getting at the Home Secretary. The right hon. and learned Member for St. Marylebone made the very fair point that prison escapes have been going on and wrong advice has been given for a very long time. All these escapes cannot be the responsibility of the present Home Secretary. Everything is being done to make certain that we have maximum security prisons within the context of a liberal régime.

7.30 p.m.

Mr. Russell Johnston: I wish to echo the compliments which have been paid to Lord Mountbatten and his three assessors for the thoroughness of their Report and the despatch with which it was produced, bearing in mind the point made by the right hon. Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes) that something produced so quickly cannot be expected to produce all the answers.
It is tempting to follow those hon. Members who have gone into the whole subject of prison reform, but I shall concentrate the few remarks which I intend to make purely on security. Neither do I intend to go into individual details about Blake or Mitchell, though I will make one brief remark about Blake. Reading the rather scarifying story of his escape, it occurs to me that perhaps he and people like him, who are the undesirable objective of the attentions of foreign Powers with relatively limitless resources, should fall into a somewhat different category from what Lord Mountbatten described as Category A.

Such men are, after all, soldiers in a cold but real war. I doubt whether they ought necessarily to be incarcerated in criminal institutions, and it occurs to me that a special military unit of some sort might be set up to deal with that category of prisoner.
The public has been rightly shocked by the inadequacies which the Report has highlighted. It is disturbing to find ourselves, as we do so often in other matters, drifting into a serious situation, in spite of all the warning signs over the years. The rising crime rate, longer prison sentences and overcrowding have been going on for a long time. It seems that always we have to await dramatic events before urgent action is generated, and that is very unfortunate.
Equally, it has been made startlingly clear that the responsibility for the situation does not lie with the sorely overtaxed prison officers themselves but with successive Administrations and with the public, who have been more concerned with the nature of punishment than with the mechanism of carrying it out.
I wish to make six specific points on which I should welcome the right hon. Gentleman's comments. First, I would commend to him those paragraphs in the Report which deal with the status of prison officers and the need to ensure that their morale is high. They are the people who work the system, and it is imperative that they should be in good heart. It is pleasing to hear the Home Secretary say that the recommendation about the senior prison officer grade is to be accepted. He ought also to look carefully at paragraph 219 on the general question of establishment ceilings. The fact that the number of prisoners has increased is not, in the end, so significant as the progressive increase in the range of work and training which prison officers carry out, and this is all linked to overcrowding and the shortage of space.
I am happy to see the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland present. In Scotland, we have up to 50 per cent. overcrowding in our prisons. Clearly, that is a situation which must be tackled.
On the general matter of status and conditions, the five-day week is of significance. In Scotland, we have the anomalous position that a five-day week operates


only in Peterhead and Aberdeen Prisons, and that has not been extended.

The second point which the Report brings out is that there appears to be a lack of any consistent line of guidance from above, and that has instanced itself in several different ways. There seem to be considerable variations in prisons of the same type. In Dartmoor, for example, the regime appears to have been easier—some might say more lax—than elsewhere. At any rate, it appears from all the evidence which we have that Mitchell apparently wanted to go there rather than somewhere else.
There is a reference in paragraph 242 to the need for a security manual. I do not know if that means necessarily that there is no standard security manual, but there is also a reference in paragraph 238 to the need for inspection, which would suggest a lack of any standard approach to both. In general, it appears that decisions which have been taken at the administrative centre, the Home Office, have not always filtered down to prison level and become fully implemented. The recommendation of an inspector general from outside to look thoroughly at the whole situation is to be welcomed.
The third matter was touched on by the hon. Member for Eton and Slough (Miss Lestor). We have not thought out properly the problem of the long-term prisoner for whom, in the Home Secretary's own words, a life sentence means a life sentence. Such men make up a new category, and many have access to quite large outside resources, which presents another risk.
In looking at the problems which they present, we have not only to consider the structural form of any fortress island prison, as it has been called. It is not just a matter of the sort of institution which might be set up, for example, in the Isle of Wight. An important factor to be considered is the kind of society which will be created inside such a prison. It is pretty scarifying to think of some sort of super prison containing 100 or 120 long-term aggressive prisoners who have nothing to look forward to, no matter how much remission they may earn. It must be extremely alarming for prison officers to contemplate the guarding of such people who have nothing to lose. I was glad to hear the Minister say that he

accepted that a small extra payment should be made, but I should have thought that quite a reasonable recompense would be necessary.
It may seem inappropriate for a Liberal to say, but I notice that in paragraph 294, the possibility of armed guards is dismissed by Mountbatten. In the very special case of long-term prisoners, I should have thought that it might be necessary. I do not see any great risk in having an armoury inside a prison.
The same paragraph, having recommended that prison officers should not be armed, goes on to say:
Shooting at a helicopter which is landing or lowering a belt from a winch comes into a different category and warning shots could be fired first.
I do not quite see how prison officers can fire shots if they have no guns. However that may be, I am not altogether satisfied that very special methods might not have to be taken in this very special category.
Fourthly, although I agree with all the remarks which have been made about categorisation and the necessity for it, we must look to some extent beyond that. As the Home Secretary is so sharply aware, there are many people in security prisons who are in for long-term sentences but who should not be in prison at all. These are people who need to be dealt with, for example, in the manner suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Dr. Winstanley) in his Criminal Responsibility Bill, because they should be in establishments for the criminally insane. Lord Justice Winn said the other day that if a certain individual ever got out he would be a danger to the public. I wish to refer to an incident which occurred in the north of England only last month.
A prisoner was taken from Strange-ways Prison to Baguley Hospital for some medical investigation. The warders warned the doctor. The actual words used were that the prisoner concerned would be liable to clobber the nurses. They made it quite clear that the prisoner was quite unpredictable in his behaviour. The doctor examined the prisoner and found that this was so. He remained in hospital for four days and then returned to Strangeways Prison, where presumably he is likely to clobber anybody at any time.


Fifthly, we should like to know whether comparable action will be taken in Scotland. I hope that reference can be made to this by the Government in the winding-up speech, though I also hope that we shall have a separate debate on this subject in the Scottish Grand Committee in due course. Lord Mountbatten was not charged with the task of examining the Scottish system, though he mentions it in paragraphs 258 and 259 of his Report. Will there be a separate Inspector-General for Scotland—a separate supremo? If not, what is to happen?
I wonder about the present building programme in Scotland. Saughton is the very last prison which was built. Some clearing-up is required. We should be told what the situation is. We look forward to the time when there will be no trebling up, as there is in so many prisons today, but when there will be gap room to allow for any increase in crime.
Sixthly, and lastly, I have in my constituency a prison, Porterfield, a wing of which was recently designated as a special unit and which is referred to by Lord Mountbatten in paragraph 258. I am concerned about this, because this is a specific example which I know about Lord Mountbatten says that he
found the security precautions impressive
at Porterfield. Presumably Lord Mountbatten meant the security precautions for its use as a maximum security prison. He uses the phrase, "maximum security wing". Whether it is a maximum security wing, a segregation unit, or a special unit, is vague. The special unit itself is not completed.
This is a prison bang in the middle of a small town. Next door to it, cheek by jowl with it, is a youth hostel. There is a builder's yard very adjacent to it, with all the implements usually to be found in a builder's yard. It is generally known that one of our more dangerous prisoners, Ellis, has already been transferred to this prison. He is a man who engaged in a bank robbery and shot the bank manager. He was charged with attempted murder. Somewhere there is £19,000 still not recovered.
This represents a serious and disturbing risk. Constituents of mine living round the prison have come to me with a petition and have said that there should

not be a maximum security prison there. Nobody particularly likes living near a prison, but I think my constituents now have a just and valid case, if this place is being used in this way without proper preparation.
Tradesmen move in and out. This is another factor which has often been drawn to my attention by prison officers. There seems to be no screening of tradesmen. There seems to be a general disinclination by the prison authorities to use the prison officer tradesmen rather than to take in outside tradesmen. For example, general work is done by people drawn from the labour exchange. I know of a case when the employment exchange actually sent a former prisoner up to the prison to do a job inside. Fortunately, he was recognised, but easily might not have been.
It is, perhaps, unfair to concentrate on a part in this way, but I believe that it emphasises the fact that this particular choice is unsatisfactory. Also it is perhaps generally indicative of how much there is to be done over the whole prison system of the United Kingdom. The Home Secretary has a very big task before him, and I hope that he will do it with all despatch.

7.45 p.m.

Mr. Sydney Silverman: I hope that the hon. Member for Inverness (Mr. Russell Johnston) will not think it a discourtesy on my part if I do not take up any of the points he made in his interesting speech, though some of them were challenging enough. My reason for not taking them up is that I want to make only one or two very short general points as my contribution to this very interesting discussion.
I have some excuse for speaking, I think. I think that 1 am not quite the only Member of Parliament with any inside experience of prisons. There are three or four others still left. But I think I am the only one who has listened to, or sought to take part in, this debate. I myself during the First World War spent 27 months in local prisons—six months in Wormwood Scrubs, nine months in a very old prison in Preston, and another 12 months in Preston. Hon. Members will have listened, I hope with some horror, to descriptions of the conditions inside local prisons, particularly the older


ones. They were exactly the same 50 years ago. I still have the most vivid recollections of them and I still get nightmares concerning them.
We are supposed to be having today a debate on a Motion to take note of the Mountbatten Report. The Mountbatten Report was about security in prisons. We are, in part, debating security in prisons, but the most important and the most notable speeches in the debate, particularly those from the Front Benches, have not been about security in prisons. They have been about prison conditions, a topic that the House has not debated for many years. I am not regretting the fact that the speeches have been concerned with prison conditions. I welcome it. I only regret that the time we have to devote to the topic is so short and comes round so rarely. I think that it is 17 or 18 years since the House was concerned with a debate on prison conditions.
Why are we debating this topic now? We are debating it because George Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs. If he had not escaped from Wormwood Scrubs, we would not have been debating it yet. It might have been another 20 years before we had another look at these conditions which still prevail, after so many generations, under a prison Act passed somewhere in the middle 1800s.
The Criminal Justice Bill is at the moment passing through the House. In many ways, it is a very good Bill. A large part of the beginning of it deals with who shall go into prison. A large part of the end of it deals with who shall come out, when, and how. There is not a word in the Bill from beginning to end about what one does with the prisoners while they are in. Yet this is the crux of the matter. is it not?
The right hon. and learned Member for St. Marylebone (Mr. Hogg) was quite right to say that what we ought to be looking at, even if we are concerned mainly with security, and certainly if we are concerned with penal reform, is what we hope to get out of our prison system. What are we running it for? Until we know what we are running it for, we shall not concern ourselves with how to do it. It is a great pity that there is nothing in the Criminal Justice Bill to deal with what must be the crux of the matter.
We might consider whether we ought to pass a resolution of thanks to Mr. Blake for giving us the opportunity to look at matters which everyone regards as most important, which we are all delighted to discuss, which we all regret not having had an opportunity to discuss earlier and which we all hope later to have fuller opportunity to discuss, but which we should not have discussed had Mr. Blake remained quietly in Wormwood Scrubs. That may be an ironic comment, but it is a true comment. Everyone in the House knows that that is so. We should not have been concerned even now, after so many years, to look at the system of slopping out in prisons if Mr. Blake had quietly slopped during his stay at Wormwood Scrubs.
In making my second point, I associate myself with something else said by the right hon. and learned Member for St. Marylebone. I referred to this in my contribution to the Second Reading debate on the Criminal Justice Bill. We must have a serious look at sentencing policy. It is not good enough for infallible old gentlemen wearing red robes and full-bottomed wigs to send people to prison for 30 or 40 years and then for the rest of us to hold up our hands in horror when they try to get out. I do not know what other hon. Members feel, but I feel that if a man is sentenced to what amounts to three or four life sentences—30 years—or five or six life sentences—40 years—we cannot expect him to sit down and do nothing about it. One must expect people like that to escape if they can, and more particularly if we tell them how easy it is.
They have nothing else to do. They have nothing to hope for. It is no good telling a man serving 40 years that he can earn one-third remission by good conduct. From his point of view, he is there for life, however well behaved he is. I cannot help thinking that Her Majesty's judges, sitting with their almost unchallengeable power in the courts and exercising their moral indignation irresponsibly and thoughtlessly in the way they do, ought on occasion to he reminded of the enormity of some of the things they do under the authority which we confer upon them and in the name of us all.
If it is conceded that a man serving a sentence of that kind will escape if he


can, it must also be conceded, must it not, that not everyone's sympathy will be against him? Mine certainly is not. If a man successfully escapes from a thoroughly inhuman and unjustifiable sentence, I cannot blame him. I applaud him. My sympathies are not with those who want to hunt him down and bring him back again. My sympathies are with him, and I dare say that a great many Members of the House of Commons will share that view.
Blake did a terrible thing. I am not defending it. I do not excuse him. I am only saying that if we inflict a penalty of that kind, we must expect, first, that he will escape from it if he can and, second, that if he does he will carry a good deal of public sympathy with him.
My third point also arises in part out of something which the right hon. and learned Member for St. Marylebone said in what I thought a very wise, civilised and humane speech. He said that one could not make a prison a factory. I do not know whether one can make a prison a factory—we succeed in making a good many factories look like prisons—but I entirely endorse, so far as I may without being thought patronising, the right hon. and learned Gentleman's view that if we want to rehabilitate a man who is at odds with society, we really must give him something constructive to do. If we take a substantial part, most or all of what he earns and we use it by way of compensation to his victims, even that is better than keeping him either unemployed altogether or employed on soul-destroying activity with no constructive value, without any interest and without any inducement to do the work well or to take a pride in doing a good job.
There are difficulties here, I know. In the past, one of the principal difficulties has been the attitude of the trade unions. I am not blaming them. That attitude was taken in days when mass unemployment was the rule and unions were concerned to protect their members' right to work. Naturally, they objected to unfair competition from people who had done nothing to deserve favours from society. Unfortunately, there is unemployment still. But we hope, do we not, that we shall be able to get back to full employment, that when we have rescued ourselves from our economic disasters we

shall be able to maintain full employment as one of the basic rights of man?
When we do, will it be impossible to devise a system whereby prisoners, particularly long-term prisoners, can be employed at trade union rates of pay, under trade union conditions, doing useful work and producing goods which are useful to the community? There will be much less inducement or incitement to escape if men in prisons—or factories, labour camps, whatever one cares to call them—are allowed to live in decent reasonably dignified human conditions, doing useful work, making a contribution by their labour to society, and perhaps making good some of the damage they have done out of the earnings which they are allowed to earn.
Those are the things we should be examining. I hope that when we are through with this debate, through with the Criminal Justice Bill and half a dozen other things with which the House is greatly concerned, and which keep cropping up from time to time, we shall have another opportunity to look at our prison system, before another 20 years have gone by, and see if we cannot create at long last a civilised form of it.
If we do, we shall not need to concern ourselves with escapology, maximum security prisons, outside organisations or popular sympathies on the wrong side, because we shall have created a situation in which none of those things would be worth while.

8.1 p.m.

Mr. Ian MacArthur: We have listened with great interest to the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman), who has taken us further along the path the debate has followed during the day, a path which I did not expect but which I welcome. We heard from my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for St. Marylebone (Mr. Hogg) and the Home Secretary a fascinating development of what I may perhaps describe as prison philosophy, and I, too, hope that the House will return to a detailed debate of the human problems involved before many months have passed.
I hope that the hon. Member will forgive me if I do not follow him in more detail now but come at once to one or two points that I would like to raise,


because I have observed that the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland has been present during the debate. A number of questions arising from the Report come within the jurisdiction of the Secretary of State for Scotland, and I hope that hon. Members will bear with me if I raise those Scottish points, because some have a wider application. As the hon. Member for Inverness (Mr. Russell Johnston) said, a brief section in the Report refers to Scotland. In fact, there are two paragraphs—paragraphs 258 and 259—and not one, as he suggested, and one or two questions arise from them.
Many of the general observations and some of the specific recommendations elsewhere in the Report will be seen to apply to Scotland, but there are some specific Scottish points to which the hon. Gentleman may reply if he is fortunate enough to catch the eye of the Chair. I see that Lord Mountbatten visited Inverness, and I shall not develop that further now. In discussing the security wing question, his Report suggested that the new maximum security prison to be built in the Isle of Wight might be used for Category A prisoners from Scotland. Has that suggestion been considered by the Secretary of State for Scotland, and if the new Isle of Wight prison is to be used in that way under
whose jurisdiction would Scottish prisoners lodged there come? Would they be under the Home Secretary or remain under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of State for Scotland? There may also be some legal implications in that point, which I have not yet studied, in view of the differences between Scots and English law. Will he give that some thought?
In paragraph 259, the Report takes up the point touched on by my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness in that Lord Mountbatten suggests that the professional head of the English Prison Service might well be invited by the Secretary of State for Scotland to extend his visits to Scottish prisons, once he has settled into the English role, in conjunction with the Scottish Inspector of Prisons. That is a valuable suggestion, and perhaps the hon. Gentleman will comment on it.
Several right hon. and hon. Members have touched on the most important question of morale in the Prison Service.

When he opened the debate, the Home Secretary quite rightly paid some attention to that, and referred to the need for better public relations for the Prison Service. Indeed, at paragraph 25 Lord Mountbatten states:
I hope therefore that really good public relations will be built up for the Prison Service.
But, of course, public relations are by no means the whole story. Important as that form of communication is in presenting the prison service in a favourable way to the outside world, it cannot fill the enormous gap which must still be filled in terms of public respect for the prison service and anxiety to join it. Public relations can call attention to the hard, unglamorous, and often thankless work of the prison officers, but the way to improve the service's standing is not only through public relations but by improving the service's condition of work, its pay and its career structure.
I was glad to see that the Report states, at the end of paragraph 223:
But the external presentation of the work of the Prison Service and the consequent improvement in an already high morale will only be effective if the internal arrangements within the Prison Service are right.
Will the hon. Gentleman turn his attention to some of the internal arrangements in the Prison Service in Scotland?
In the Scottish paragraphs of the Report, Lord Mountbatten suggested that the new promotion structure and new officer grade which he proposes for England might also find their place in Scotland. I hope that that will be so, because clearly the career structure and promotion prospects of the service are important factors in making the service attractive to people outside.
The prison buildings in Scotland are unsatisfactory. The hon. Member for Inverness reminded us that they are grossly overcrowded. It is hard to see how any process of rehabilitation can be successful in the surroundings in which prisoners are housed at present, and how prison officers can do their work most efficiently if they are subjected to conditions of that kind.
In a reply to a Question earlier this month, the Secretary of State told me that work in hand on prison building would provide 10 per cent. more places. Can the hon. Gentleman tell us what


sort of places those will be? Will they be sufficient to keep up with the increase in the prison population, which is a reflection of the depressing increase in the rate of crime, or will they go some way towards easing the present overcrowding from which we suffer in Scotland?
The right hon. Gentleman also told me in a Written Answer that negotiations were going on for three sites in Scotland for new prison buildings. He said in a written answer:
Negotiations are in progress for the acquisition of sites for three new establishments to provide about 900 places."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 2nd February, 1967; Vol. 740, c. 160.]
What effect will those 900 places have on overcrowding? It would also be interesting to know where those sites are, how the negotiations are progressing and what sort of building programme is envisaged. Perhaps they could be used as an experimental development of the new type of prison we all look for.
There is also the question of recruitment. According to Answers which the right hon. Gentleman gave me on 2nd February to my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Cathcart (Mr. Edward M. Taylor) some time in January, the Scottish Prison Service is about 10 per cent. short of men at present. I understand that there are 1,432 men in the service and that about another 140 are needed to maintain present standards and eleminiate excessive overtime. Is that figure sufficient? If we are to implement the terms of the Report there will be a need for more prison officers to provide the security for which we look. I fear that the 140 forecast by the right hon. Gentleman in January may prove to be an under estimate.
Secondly, the excessive overtime we have to get rid of is indeed excessive. I learnt in another reply that these 1,400 prison officers worked about 320,000 hours overtime last year. That is far too high a figure. I hope that the Under-Secretary of State will be able to tell us what steps are being taken to improve recruitment and so to reduce overtime in Scottish prisons. I hope that he can say what prospect there is for a five-day week for the service.
I understand from the Secretary of State that the advertising campaign is to be increased over the coming months in

order to improve recruitment which I gather has been going ahead reasonably well over the last months. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will tell us the recruitment target for the coming months so that we can see from time to time how things are going.
I now want to refer to a constituency question which has given me a great deal of concern. I am glad that Perth Prison takes part in the "training for freedom" scheme. This is a valuable way of rehabilitating what one might call trustworthy prisoners for return to civilian life. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for St. Marylebone referred to deficiencies in the administrative system and I am sorry to have to tell the House of a grave deficiency which came to my notice some weeks ago.
A man from Perth Prison was working in the scheme in December and I learnt some weeks later by pure chance that he had escaped from the building site he was working on as part of the scheme. To my astonishment, I discovered that, although Perth Prison immediately informed the Scottish Office Prison Division in Edinburgh, no action whatever was taken to inform the Press or the public of the escape. So some weeks passed before anyone knew that a prisoner was on the run.
I believe that there has been some confusion as to whether or not he has been caught. I understand that he has not. If that is so, is it not likely that he might have been caught had the public been alerted to the fact that he had escaped? I regard this as really a very worrying deficiency in the administrative system.
I must say at once that I wrote to the Secretary of State for Scotland at the beginning of January and had a letter from him a few days ago in which, it is only fair to say, he apologised for this grave error and recognised its seriousness. I understand from the letter that action has been taken to stop this grave error from happening again. I am glad, too, that the right hon. Gentleman made it clear that this extraordinary oversight was not the responsibility of the prison authorities in Perth or of the prison officers. Very rightly, he pointed to his own Prison Department and thereby, I presume, acepted the ultimate responsibility himself.


This is a serious matter and I hope that the Under-Secretary of State will be able to reassure us that this sort of mistake will never happen again because, obviously, we cannot tolerate a situation in which a prisoner can escape even from such a scheme as "training for freedom" without the Press and the public being alerted. It is extraordinary that this error occurred, particularly as it came hard on the heels of a succession of spectacular escapes from prisons in England.

Mr. Hector Monro: As my hon. Friend knows, I have had this type of escape from the Dumfries Young Offenders' Institution in my constituency. Does he not agree that the impression is abroad in Scotland that, in the matter of publicity, very often the Secretary of State has come down on the side of the prisoner rather than on that of informing the public?

Mr. MacArthur: That impression has been given, and I hope that the Under-Secretary of State will be able to tell the Secretary of State of our concern about this matter and that, in the course of the review which I understand is being undertaken following publication of the Mountbatten Report, he will study not only the whole question of public relations for the prison service but also the conditions in which the prison officers work and take steps to improve the whole pattern of communications between the authorities and the public in relation to the prison service, prison escapes and the whole climate in which the Prison Service in Scotland is conducted.

8.15 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. Norman Buchan): It would be wrong of me to go into too much detail on the points raised, for if I were to do so my speech would be a major one and this is only an intervention to deal with some of the points raised by the hon. Member for Inverness (Mr. Russell Johnston) and the hon. Member for Perth and East Perthshire (Mr. MacArthur).
One should be clear that the kind of problem existing in Scotland is very different from that which gave rise, in a sense, to the Mountbatten Report. In this sense, we are all pleased that Scotland is not involved in that imme-

diate problem so that we can discuss this situation in general. There is no spy problem in Scotland—nothing of the nature of the 42-year sentence in the Blake case, no international security problem or development of highly organised groups outside organising escapes. It seems that most sophisticated Scottish criminals tend to drift south—possibly another example of the brain drain and one that we might welcome. So it is very much a kind of normal prison problem that we are dealing with.
I will first deal with the point raised by the hon. Member for Inverness in relation to Inverness Prison. It is important to keep in mind that the Mountbatten Report gave a very favourable comment on it. Lord Mountbatten said:
I found the security precautions impressive.
That was a flat, definite and absolute statement.
I recognise the hon. Member's anxieties, however. We had to find a place where a small number of maximum security prisoners could be accommodated. Inverness is a small prison. It already existed and there were factors within the building which made it possible to adapt it to what the hon. Gentleman wanted to have more closely defined but which Lord Mountbatten called a "security wing". There were very good reasons why the wing should be there. I recognise the hon. Gentleman's anxieties, as I have said, but he would not expect me to shift a prison at the relative cost in terms of a youth hostel.
We have been thoroughly checking the problem that is mainly exercising the people of Inverness—the perimeter problem—and I expect to receive a report shortly. A number of questions have been raised in the past by the hon. Gentleman and the local council on such matters, and the hon. Gentleman can rest assured that, no matter what steps we take arising out of the review, we shall consult the local authority.

Mr. Russell Johnston: But why the decision that dangerous prisoners should be put there before the security wing is ready? It will not be ready for 18 months?

Mr. Buchan: They were put there because the security arrangements were found to be impressive. The answer to the hon. Gentleman is in the Mountbatten Report. He cannot have it both ways.
The other question he raised, in common with the hon. Member for Perth and East Perthshire, was that of the "supremo"—the Inspector-General. In a sense, this may be something on which we in Scotland are already ahead of England. We have had an inspector of prisons for the last two or three years, and it may be that the Mountbatten inquiry learnt something from this. We shall be continuing with our inspectorate, but we should certainly welcome visits by the "supremo", who may also learn from Scottish experience as well as teaching something. We will welcome his presence, but we shall maintain our own inspectorate system.
Hon. Members referred also to the question of the five-day week in the Prison Service. I understand that it has not been put into practice in Inverness but that it is in practice in Peterhead and Aberdeen. The five-day week at Aberdeen worked very successfully. We have not been satisfied with what has happened at the other prison and we shall recast the scheme. I should be very optimistic in the present situation if I were to suggest that we shall have a five-day week in all prisons. The 320,000 hours overtime mentioned by the hon. Member for Perth and East Perthshire gives some indication of the size of the problem.
I am glad that the hon. Member referred to the incident at Perth in the terms in which he did. Sometimes we are not very helpful to prison officers, to security or to the public when we raise matters too sharply. I thank the hon. Gentleman for the way in which he dealt with this matter. The letter from the Secretary of State has been sent to him. We accept the error. It was not in prison arrangements or in information to the Prison Department. It was purely that it was not notified to the information officer. Whether if this had been done it would have led to the arrest of the prisoner, I cannot say. The hon. Member asked whether I could guarantee that it would not happen again. This reminds

me of Shakespeare—"How absolute the rogue is". We cannot be as absolute as this. We are making every effort to ensure that it will not happen again. We regret the incident.
It does not follow that there is a general tendency to believe that we are more concerned with the prisoner than with the public. This is not the case. The public must be our No. 1 priority. Security must come first. Following on that come the needs of the prisoner. But neither point arose in this case.
The hon. Gentleman referred to the question of public relations. We have been looking at this very closely. The promotion structure is part of the same thing, and we hope to be able to say something more on this very shortly.
We have been fairly happy about the recruiting campaign. I do not know whether hon. Members have seen the figures. The campaign started in August. There have been 2,258 inquiries about the Prison Service. The high point of the campaign was reached in September. There were 834 inquiries—that is, roughly a third of the total—in the one month. This is an indication that a campaign of this kind can bring results. About 115 people have been successful in their applications. In a sense there is no target figure. In certain respects "infinity" is the wrong word but we can use all the officers we can recruit.
I come to the question of sites. We are talking about three sites. There have been difficulties in negotiations about the acquisition of land and access to land. We are now in at least two cases coming to the end of that kind of preliminary difficulty. One site will be the new place for women prisoners which, we hope, will be run on slightly better lines. The other will be for adult male prisoners. We shall be drawing on experience and the kind of discussion which has taken place in the House tonight before we go ahead with it.
I have been pressed on the question of dates. It is very difficult to give dates, but I should be misleading the House if I were to suggest that these new buildings will come into being shortly—certainly not before 1970. We are concerned with the early 1970s.
I hope that I have dealt with most of the points which have been raised. The


key thing for which we are waiting in terms of security is the new review on perimeter security.

8.24 p.m.

Mr. Mark Woodnutt: I cannot match the record of time spent in British gaols of the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) but I can claim that I have spent an equivalent amount of time in Greek and German gaols, and I can appreciate the first point which he made in his excellent speech. I should like to refer to his last point and to say how much I agree with the need to give long-term prisoners, in particular, a worth-while job to do. This is important from the point of view of security, of rehabilitation and of reintroducing into them some form of self-respect. We should not only give them a job but pay them the rate for the job as long as a suitable deduction is made for the cost of their keep and as long as they pay some sort of compensation to the people who have suffered at their hands.
I wish to add my congratulations to Earl Mountbatten on the thoroughness and common sense of his Report and the speed with which it has been produced. We should also congratulate the Home Secretary on matching this by the speed with which he accepted the Report's main recommendations. I am particularly concerned with this matter because we already have two prisons in the Isle of Wight—Parkhurst and Camp Hill. A third—Albany—is under construcion and we are to have a fourth, the maximum security prison. They will all be contiguous in the same perimeter. This has been accepted locally with great difficulty. Nevertheless, the wisdom of the recommendations in the Report is recognised. All the local authorities are assisting by co-operating with the Home Office in ensuring that these plans come to fruition.
The paragraph which horrified me was that it was recommended that the name of the new prison should be Vectis, which is, of course, the Roman name for the Isle of Wight. This is wholly unacceptable to people on the island. Sixteen trading organisations use this name. It is used in our publicity. If it were used in other contexts, people would think of prisons. I was going to table a Question to the Home Secretary asking him to give

an assurance that he would not name the prison Vectis, Wight, Jenkins or Mountbatten, but today I received a note saying that he had agreed that it should not be called Vectis. I thank him for meeting me on this point.
When areas co-operate with the Home Office in putting up prisons, the Department should be a little more forthcoming when it is asked to make a simple concession like this and should not make people wait six weeks before giving agreement.
Paragraph 14 of the Report says that there is no really secure prison in the country. I have no doubt that that is correct, but it could have been a little better worded. It caused quite a lot of alarm and worry in areas in which there are top security prisons, particularly in the Island, where we have people like Straffen, the child murderer, and the train robbers. Having been in and seen the top security block, I have spent the last year assuring people that it really is top security and that it would be very difficult for prisoners to get out.
The qualification should have been included in the Report that although prisons as a whole cannot be considered as secure, in the top security blocks every device has been used—electronics, various mechanical aids, closed-circuit television, everything possible—and although it can never be made completely impossible for someone to escape, in such places escape is almost impossible.
It so happened when I was last in Parkhurst Prison that I was present when two prisoners escaped from the outside part of the prison and I was able to see the whole of the security arrangements brought into operation. I have nothing but praise for the speed with which the Governor controlled the operations and all the men who were not working at the time immediately came back on duty, pulling on their uniforms as they rushed into the prison. The prisoners were recaptured within two hours.
These things also should be remembered, because people in the locality of prisons become very worried when they see headlines to the effect that no prison is secure. The scheme which immediately comes into force as soon as a prisoner escapes from a prison like Parkhurst is extremely efficient. I understand that


only two prisoners from that prison have ever succeeded in getting off the Island. This is worthy of congratulation all round for all those who have anything to do with it.
That brings me to my main point, which concerns prison officers. I regard as the most important aspect of the Report of Earl Mountbatten that dealing with prison officers. The most important factor in ensuring that we have adequate security and a good Prison Service in the future is to make certain that we maintain high morale in the prison service. I endorse what was said by the hon. Member for Hammersmith, North (Mr. Tomney) when he asked the Home Secretary whether he would accept the recommendations and the memorandum put forward by the Prison Officers' Association.
These men are always on risk. They are on risk much more than a policeman, because they are there in prison, particularly a place like Parkhurst, with criminals the whole time. I do not lack courage, but when I go round Parkhurst Prison and find myself locked in one of the working shops with about 30 men and only two prison officers, to say the least I feel apprehensive. I certainly have great admiration for those two officers who stand there all day, with the criminals in their care outnumbering them by 15 to 1, who could easily turn on them and, if need be, kill them.
We must accept all these recommendations. It is quite wrong that a man in the prison service has to wait 16 years for promotion. He must in future be promoted on ability and not solely on seniority. The level of pay should undoubtedly be at least the same as for the police. The compensation for widows should be increased and compensation to men who are injured during their duty should certainly be adequate, which at present it is not. The suggestion by Lord Mountbatten of a new rank of senior prison officer is first class, because this is a way of recognising ability and of giving a higher rate of pay to men who prove themselves worthy of it.
Our liberal attitude and the liberal attitude of the Report to prison life is right. It is clearly wrong that men, however evil they may be, should be treated like animals. It is right that prisoners

should be rehabilitated and that they should be prepared to rejoin the outside world as decent citizens. It is also right that they should not be allowed to stagnate and suffer acute boredom inside prison. My worry always is that the do-gooders will go too far in what they want to do for the prisoner. It is extremely difficult to maintain the right sort of balance. All I ask the Home Secretary to remember is that punishment is an end in itself and not just a means to an end.

8.35 p.m.

Mr. Edward Lyons: The kernal of the problem that we have been debating today is that of achieving swiftly a large number of modern prisons. It is quite clear from the Mountbatten Report that it is impossible to have a proper liberal regime in an old-fashioned prison and, at the same time, to have security.
My hon. Friend the Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. Sydney Silverman) demanded civilised prisons, and civilised prisons mean modern prisons. Prisons in this country fall into three categories. There are those which are not the property of the State, including Dartmoor and Preston prisons. There are only four of these altogether. The remainder in the other two categories are the property of the State. They are those which have been built since 1878 and are owned legally and beneficially by the State, and those built before 1878 which were nationalised by the Conservative Government of that time in the Prison Act, 1877.
The city prisons about which we have been hearing—Pentonville, Armley and Walton—were built before the Prison Act, 1877, and were nationalised, but perhaps the Conservatives lacked experience for they were not nationalised in a very sensible way. Although the legal title was transferred to the State by that Act, it was said that whenever the State closed one of those prisons—there are still 33 in existence in our principal towns—it had to offer the prison to the local council in whose area it was and that local council would buy it back from the State on a basis of compensation calculated on £120 per cell in respect only of those cells occupied by people sentenced by that local authority.
If within a few months of the closure of a prison the local authority does not avail


itself of the right to buy, the State sells and has to return to the local authority all the moneys it obtains by the sale except for the compensation calculated at £120 per cell. It is calculated that to replace Wandsworth Prison would cost £4 million but all the State would get out of the sale would be £1,056. There has been a deterrent throughout the century for the State to build new prisons because it could not obtain more than a token payment in terms of site value. We have heard a great deal today about how valuable prison sites are, but they are not valuable to the State. They are valuable to the local authority—in the case of Wandsworth, to Surrey County Council. The State would get £100,000 but Surrey County Council would be made very wealthy indeed.
What incentive is there to the State, looking purely at the value of the site, in hastening to build many more prisons? Looking at the law, one finds that in 1952 the provisions about compensation were re-enacted precisely in the Prison Act that year. The trouble with that is that £120 in 1877 was worth a great deal of money. By 1952 it was worth a great deal less, and now it is worth less still, so the compensation which the Government are getting grows less and less, while the value of the sites goes up and up. I suggest that the Government should bring in a Measure designed to ensure that the equity in these prisons reverts to the State and not to the local councils. All that it needs is a small Bill saying that Section 38 of the Prisons Act, 1952, shall not have effect. Once that is done, the State will have in its pocket a great deal more in the way of assets than it has now and will be able to use that money—and it should be so stipulated—as a building fund to help in the building of new prisons.
I should like the Home Secretary to cause investigations to be made into the market value of those 33 prisons in this country, to calculate—and it is a fixed calculation—how much the State would obtain from local councils by way of compensation, and to enable us to see the difference between these two figures. My feeling is that it will prove to be colossal, and the money could be used by the State in due course to replace these old existing prisons which are a blight on the community.
There is a reference in the Mountbatten Report to the security situation in the new security prison on the Isle of Wight. On looking at the plans of the new prison, Lord Mountbatten considered whether he could organise an escape from it. He envisaged that there were still two ways in which it could be done. One was to use a helicopter, together with an aeroplane, guns, and a motor car. Using those four items, he could see a way of beating the precautions in the new security prison. An alternative way, he said, was to use a helicopter with a winch attached, coming low over the prison.
The fact that Lord Mountbatten, who is not given to flights of fancy, should consider that it is within the resources of organised crime to arrange an escape by using an aeroplane and a helicopter shows how serious the problem of top flight organised crime has become—this is yet another argument for majority verdicts—and therefore the State must be prodigal if necessary in the expenditure of money to defend our security, because prison security in the long term is our security.
It is suggested that we should install in our prisons not iron bars but layers and layers of glass which would take a man with a pick axe two hours to break through to the extent of making a 2 ft. aperature. This would be a very expensive substitute for iron bars, but the fact that these matters are being considered shows the degree of the problem, and I would always be 100 per cent. behind the Home Secretary in whatever demands he made on the public purse to achieve this kind of security.

8.44 p.m.

Mr. Robert Cooke: Since Christmas I have visited Wormwood Scrubs, Pentonville, Winchester, Bristol, Dorchester, Shepton Mallet, The Verne training prison, Portland, Guy's Marsh and Reading Borstal institutions.
During the course of my researches, I have received the helpful co-operation of the Home Office and the help and encouragement of the many members of the Prison Service whom I have had the pleasure of meeting. This would also seem to have aroused considerable curiosity in the Press and broadcasting


organisations. Some of the reports have been somewhat ill-informed and verging on the sensational. This would be a fault in the sort of reporting which one gets on debates like this and on some of the more spectacular escapes which have taken place.
This can be remedied by the Home Office providing more information of a digestible kind for the information services. By so doing the public would be very much better informed about what was going on inside prisons and inside the Home Office in its attempt to make our prison system more workable and effective in its task of rehabilitation.
The public have a very poor appreciation of conditions within the prisons and of the conditions of the inmates. More particularly the public know very little about the devoted work of the many members of the Prison Service. They could be better informed if more information came out of headquarters, and I hope that this will be attended to. The public are naturally more concerned with security than anything else. That is supported by the Government White Paper on The Adult Offender, which says that:
The first need is to protect society against the dangerous man or woman who by crime will disturb its peace if at large. The idea that any one is incurably wicked is distasteful and hard to accept. But experience shows that there are some who will not make friends with society ever.
I would ask the House to bear that in mind in our discussions on this very difficult subject. We are faced with a shortage of staff, inadequate buildings and terrible overcrowding in many places. The solution is not just to build more and more prisons. We must do what we can to reduce the intake, and the Criminal Justice Bill is seeking to do that among other things. There is the alternative sentence for the person who might find himself inside for a very short term.
A point which has not been dealt with so far is the way in which young persons graduate into a life of crime. The system by which they move from approved school to borstal, in and out of borstal and borstal recall, because they are not old enough to go into prison. They almost gain distinctions along the way, in the eyes of the rest of the prison community. There is something very

seriously wrong here, and if we are faced with this hopeless overcrowding of the expanding prison population this is where it ought to be tackled.
I am told that in many of the open borstals the people running them have no difficulties because they can send on the impossible case to some other place. But there are borstals which have nowhere to send a person and life is very difficult indeed. Statistics prove that the borstal system was designed for a very different type of inmate, and that a much poorer quality and more difficult class of person is finding himself inside the borstals. The shorter sentence, which I believe is designed to expand the facilities and get more people through the machinery is not as effective as the longer sentences previously imposed.
There is a third class of person—what one might call the persistent public nuisance. This is the person who is in and out of prison all his middle life, having followed a life of petty crime. These are surely not the sort of people whom we should imprison for ever. I propose camps or farms or communities of some kind or another where these people can become part of something like the outside life for which they are so unfitted. This would be better than locking them up in prison. These people are often inadequate, friendless and old, and they need the companionship that such places can give them. This is a problem created by the Welfare State, because in days gone by these people were the hangers-on of large households or benevolent institutions of one sort or another. Many of these have perished because of the onset of the Welfare State and high taxation. There are the special cases of alcoholics and the growing number of drug addicts. Surely the answer here is treatment. I wonder how many chronic alcoholics who are in and out of prison all their lives have ever been treated with aversion therapy, which is the only way to handle their trouble. One cannot cure the disease, but this method will keep them off alcohol, perhaps for good.
I do not underestimate the difficulties, but, with a reduced prison population, we would not need a vast increase in staff and could achieve better and more secure conditions within the existing system. Whatever we may want to do, it is


unrealistic to think that we can tear down our Victorian prisons and re-build them in this generation, with all the other demands on our resources.
Another important aspect is the allocation of prisoners, on arrival in prison, to the institutions which can do them most good. Half our prison problem is that we do not sort them out efficiently enough. Apart from security considerations, one must consider a prisoner's mental state. I am not impressed with what the Report says about Frank Mitchell, because his mental classification is changed several times and the relevant paragraph contains contradicting medical terms. If that can happen in Mitchell's case, no doubt it happens in others.
A small percentage of difficult prisoners can completely upset all the reform and improvement in a prison. We cannot tolerate the possibility of good work for the majority being upset by a small minority who are in the wrong place. Many prisons are trying to perform too many different functions. We know that at Wormwood Scrubs there are five different types of prisoner, from borstal allocation to the attempt to keep secure the really dangerous criminal.
I spent some time yesterday in Worm-wood Scrubs and was most impressed with the new security measures, although I still believe that the circumstances of Blake's escape were incredible. The perimeter is now well defended, but why have not the Home Office thought of making secure enclosures within it? Why are there not wire fences linking some of the parallel blocks, forming enclosed exercise yards? Surely that would produce the conditions for which Lord Mountbatten asks.
Why the delay in demolishing the temporary buildings, which are a security hazard, and why have the covered ways between the blocks not been wired off to avoid the need for supervision when moving prisoners? These things would not cost a great deal and could be done with prison labour. Surely this should be proceeded with without delay. This applies in other older prisons, too.
I turn from Wormwood Scrubs to security in general. I have seen a number of weaknesses which I will pass on to the Home Secretary. I think that that would

be more public-spirited than ventilating them now with others listening. I hope that he will consider them and perhaps give me an answer. I get the impression that some of the general Home Office directives to prisons are impracticable and that a more individual direction for each establishment might be necessary. Perhaps that will be done under the new arrangements.
I will give some details of the need for improvement. There are now radio links with the outside, although not in every prison, and some prison officers are linked by radio with their control rooms in the prison. The right hon. Gentleman said that that was all fixed up at Wormwood Scrubs, but it is not universal in the prisons in which we are trying to improve security. That should be speeded up. Other points are the use of manganese bars, which cannot be cut with a hacksaw, and which have been introduced in a number of establishments—out not everywhere—and bandit glass. There is the question of dead ground outside the prison. There are obviously houses which must be acquired in the interests of security. I make no secret about the fact that there is one in Bristol only four feet from the top of the wall. It is a well-known hazard. The house belongs to a private individual, and perhaps we could negotiate for its purchase.
I have found cases where new locks on prison doors have no keys, and even prison doors which have as yet no locks. This is extraordinarily irritating and demoralising to the Prison Service. I hope that we shall see some action without delay.
Allied to the question of security is the factor that perhaps we do not have sufficient deterrents against escapes, at any rate for the short-term prisoner. In 1966, of the 86 escapes from closed prisons, 25 prisoners had sentences of five years or more. It is therefore understandable that they should try to break out. But the other 61 might have been deterred from escaping by the prospect of increased sentences for escaping. This might be something which could be taken into account in the Criminal Justice Bill in which additional deterrents could be embodied.
There will be extenuating circumstances. A man who found that his wife


was being interfered with would make every effort to get out, however long he had to serve, even if it were only a few weeks. But increased sentences for escaping might deter short-term prisoners from trying too hard to escape.
Prison conditions have been an important subject in the debate. The overcrowding is simply terrible in many places. On the whole, prisoners are well fed, well clothed, heated, and exercised, and in some prisons a wide variety of work is available, not all of it of a monotonous nature. More must be done in that direction. Periods of association provide for a social life of a kind. Prisoners have television, broadcasting, newspapers, books, and classes, with outside people to lecture them, and visitors from home.
I join with other hon. Members in saying that the one great disgrace is the terrible condition of sanitation, which is degrading not only for the prisoners but for the prison officers. This problem is not insoluble even in the old buildings.
The Home Secretary said that it was a shameful fact that sanitation facilities had been built into Pentonville and then taken out again. He did not tell the House why they had been taken out again. It was because in those days prisoners were allowed no personal possessions, and they hid what little they had down the drain. For that reason the sanitation did not work, and it was taken out again.
With the new techniques which we have at our command, I am sure that we could and should do a great deal—there is no need for this to be expensive—with the new techniques of building which have just been developed.
I hope that we shall see much more constructive work—I do not mean necessarily putting in drains—in construction work for prinsoners, prison industries and training. Some hon. Members seem unaware that there are training prisons where men can learn quite skilled jobs, and have on occasions gone out to work, before they completed their sentences on one day a week in order to get used to the job they will have when they leave prison.
There are many other points that I would like to cover. I am glad that the Home Secretary has entered the Chamber.

I am sure that he will deal with these matters when he winds up the debate. He sent me a reply to a Question in which he said that there was £11 million worth of building now in progress. He told me that only £1·83 million of it would be finished in 1966–67, only £5·5 million in 1967–68 and £2·7 million in 1968–69. Although we see quite a big increase in the amount of provision in 1967–68, it would appear that a fairly savage cut has taken place and we now have information that even less is being done this year. I hope we shall see a reappraisal of this.
I would now like to ask him one question which he might find difficult. He told the House that the cuts which were made were made before the Mountbatten Report. They were, but they were made after January 1966 when we had the appointment of Mr. R. C. Lewis as assistant director for security.
These cuts were made before the Mountbatten Report, but they were made shortly after what might be called the Lewis Report. I am sure that in the Home Office there is a document, produced by Mr. Lewis, which must contain a great deal of what is in the Mountbatten Report. It must have been in the light of that report that these cuts were made. I am sorry to say, in passing, that Mr. Lewis appears not to have had any conversations with Lord Mountbatten about the production of the latter's report and submitted only written evidence. I hope that the Home Secretary will deal with that. It may be that the Home Secretary was not able to extract from the Chancellor of the Exchequer the money which he wanted—I know how devoted he is to what I might call our cause in this matter—but I hope that we can have an explanation.
I hope that some of the new building is to be modified in view of the reports of Lewis and Mountbatten, because I have seen some mose insecure cell blocks where the architectural artistry would positively invite escape, and I hope that some new materials will be used. I wonder how much consultation there has been with the Prison Service, not just the governors, but even prison officers, because I am sure that we should work up a partnership with the people who have to work the building and who should feel that at least they have had their say about what is


constructed. I also hope that the building programme will include ample provision for quarters for prison officers, because they must have their share.
Had time permitted, I would have liked to deal with after-care, but their noble Lordships dealt with that subject admirably last week and I hope that it will always be part of what we are trying to do. I hope that I have not raced ahead so fast that no one has heard anything I have had to say, but I know that two more hon. Members can now speak in the debate.
I have seen the Home Secretary accused of losing the confidence of the Prison Service. I would not accuse him of that, but I would say that he is at least a much misunderstood man and that there is a lack of sense of direction and a lack of communication between him and those who are actually running the prisons, and I hope that he will improve this situation.
Those who work in our prisons belong to a devoted and a largely forgotten service. The Government must devise a much clearer policy and a much more incisive policy and Parliament must provide the means for carrying it out. I hope that the spectacular and serious escapes—and they are serious because of the nature of the prisoners who have escaped—will not be allowed to obscure the underlying problems. Incidentally, I would like to see the figures of the escapes frustrated by valiant prison officers and I hope that we can have them at some time. Let this all not be just a nine days' wonder, but let us ensure that the interest of Parliament and the public is sustained in this vital, but sadly neglected, part of our society.

9.3 p.m.

Mr. Peter Archer: The hon. Member for Bristol, West (Mr. Robert Cooke) is more familiar with the inside of our prisons than the most unfortunate of my clients. I do not claim to speak with his wealth of authority. If I do not comment on all his remarks, he is entitled to assume that for the greater part of what he said, silence implies assent.
Much has been said about the importance of morale in the Prison Service. I should like to take issue with the

hon. Member for Inverness (Mr. Russell Johnston) who, in the course of a very forceful but moderate speech, said that in paragraph 294 of the Mountbatten Report there was possibly a mistaken view. This is the paragraph in which it is recommended that the Prison Service should not be armed.
A short time ago, I had occasion to visit a prison in London and after my business was concluded I was invited to the staff canteen. There I met a number of prison officers. After the second sandwich, they began to forget that I was a Member of Parliament, and I learned a great deal about their attitude. One of the matters discussed was the possibility of arming them and, about this, one of them told me, "It would be quite easy for me to sit on top of tower in the centre of the prison at the end of a machine gun. It would certainly be easier than what I have to do now. However, I joined the Prison Service with the idea of making a positive contribution. I have got to know some of the people in this prison and I am sure that if they saw me down the wrong end of a machine gun they would never speak to me again as a human being" There is a great deal in what he said, and for that reason I take issue with the remarks of the hon. Member for Inverness.

Mr. Russell Johnston: I was not suggesting that there should be any general arming, but that it might be necessary in the very maximum security prisons.

Mr. Archer: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for clarifying the point. It that is all he had in mind, I am not sure that I take issue with him. The whole question clearly brings out the fact that one cannot divide up the techniques of security and policy matters.
I do not for a moment believe, as the right hon. Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes) expressed it, that prison escapes are part of the price that we must pay for our more enlightened system of penology. However, I do believe that absolute security, if it is possible to achieve, could be achieved only at a price which we, as a society, should not be prepared to pay. One could possibly ensure absolute security if a ball and chain were attached to the legs of every prisoner. One might even keep all prisoners locked in their cells for virtually their whole time in prison. However,


this would be the worst possible incentive to the best type of prison officers, and it is clear that some concessions must be made, even if occasionally it means that the result is not absolute security.
If a prisoner is to be returned to take his place in the world, it would be the height of folly to do that directly from a situation of maximum security. It would be asking to have him back again a week later. In these circumstances, someone must take a decision from time to time about which prisoners might be afforded more open conditions and, resulting from this, there is the possibility that, on occasion, mistakes will be made. Of course, I hope that we shall not treat mistakes lightly.
I had occasion not long ago to discuss his job with the medical superintendent of a Broadmoor institution. He told me that the greatest nightmare of his life was that someone whom he had recommended for release would kill or commit some other offence, having been released. He said, "I cannot insure myself against nightmares at the expense of keeping everyone inside. I have to back my judgment". That is basic to any aspect of public administration. We can only insure ourselves against mistakes at the cost of never taking a decision.
I have been surprised to note that no reference has been made to paragraph 318 of the Report, in which, after a masterly survey of the technical precautions which can make for security, reference is made to what might be called "psychological barriers"—and if any hon. Member is put off by the word "psychology" I would be happy to substitute the term "common sense".
If someone is determined to escape, it will be difficult to prevent him from doing so without making life virtually impossible for all concerned. There is room for a great deal of research and thought into the main factors which make people want to escape. In many cases a prisoner will make a cold and rational estimate of the position and will then decide whether or not it is worth taking the risk. Perhaps, in that sort of case, we must accept that one needs to watch him like a lynx. If a man is given such a long sentence and in such conditions that he has nothing to hope for, one cannot be surprised if he breaks out.
The second category is comprised of those to whom the possibility of escape presents a challenge. Anyone who has read "The Prisoner of Zenda" or even "Huckleberry Finn" will know the feeling that exists in all of us, particularly when reading about these matters or when reading stories about escapes from prisoner-of-war camps. I believe that these feelings are sometimes projected into escapes from Her Majesty's Prisons. With the right kind of prisoner, one possible way of dealing with the problem would be to remove the challenge by offering him open conditions. Any challenge having been removed, there are certain types of prisoner who would no longer be impelled to escape.
The third group comprises two categories of men. There is the man with a genuine or imaginary "beef", because he is really innocent or because of something which has happened inside the prison. The other category is the man with a personal problem, possibly to whom some kind friend has indicated that his wife is carrying on with a neighbour. Unless he can be satisfied in some way, he will be impelled to break out.
Until we have a more satisfactory welfare service with more welfare officers a possibility might be to make greater use of those dedicated people, the prison visitors—not the visiting justices, but ordinary lay people who visit a prison. get to know prisoners and go to see their wives and families. The alternative would be for the prisoner to have the prospect of being able to talk it over with his wife for long enough to satisfy himself.
Then there is the man who is unable to resist temptation, and who, if he sees the hole to which my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heller) referred, cannot resist walking through it. In that case, clearly the only satisfactory safeguard is to make sure that there are no holes of that kind left accidentally.
Perhaps the truth of the matter is that if, in all these cases, a man feels that he will be deliberately released within the foreseeable future when the time is ripe, then he is not so likely to be released accidentally before then.
The right hon. Member for Ashford asked who was to allocate prisoners to the


categories mentioned in the Report. Possibly a clue might be found in the provisions of the Criminal Justice Bill which we shall be discussing shortly in Committee as to the way in which it shall be decided who are to be admitted to parole, and when, because the factors have a great deal in common.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Toxteth (Mr. Crawshaw) said, there is not really any conflict between rehabilitation and protecting society. Society, the Treasury, the Prison Service and the prisoner himself are all adequately satisfied if there comes a time when we can say to a prisoner meaningfully and voluntarily, "Go and sin no more".

9.13 p.m.

Mr. W. H. Loveys: I am sure that the hon. Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton (Mr. Archer) will understand that, because of the clock, I shall not follow his argument. He made an excellent speech, and I agree entirely with what he and other hon. Members have said about the reasonable treatment of prisoners.
I join in welcoming the Report. It has had a general welcome in the House; it has had a general welcome from the Prison Officers' Association, and I am sure that it will have a general welcome from the public. I have enjoyed reading it, because it is one of the most readable and interesting Command Papers that I have ever seen.
I do not mention the individual escapes, which were described in one national newspaper as reading like a James Bond novel. Indeed, I have not time to talk about anything very much, having come last in the batting order. In view of that, I have thrown away my prepared notes about security. I was going to solve the whole problem, but, unfortunately, the Home Secretary will not be able to hear my ideas on the subject.
I shall confine my remarks to the Prison Service. That has not been covered in the debate as widely as prison security. I do not pretend to be an expert about the Prison Service, but one of the problems with it is that it is perhaps too much of a closed book. Members of the public know a great deal about the Police Force and its forma-

tion, and about the Armed Services, but we are ignorant about the Prison Service. That is a great pity.
On the face of things, the morale of the service is high. Looking at the recruitment figures and particularly at the small figures of wastage, that would seem to be the case. However, the public attitude to the service seems to be misguided and misinformed. I have always regarded prison officers as supplying a tremendous public service to the community. I was surprised and shocked to be told in a whisper by a constituent, whose occupation I did not know, that he had spent all his working life as a prison officer but that he kept quiet about it on the housing estate where he lived because he realised that his occupation was looked down upon by the community as a whole. It might well be an exceptional case. I am sure that this is not how all prison officers feel, but it is absolutely wrong that this should be the feeling of this person.
Every step should be taken by means of public relations and Press publicity to put the matter right. Lord Mountbatten was right when he stated in his Report:
The safe custody and, so far as possible, the rehabilitation of criminals is not an occupation to be looked down upon. On the contrary, it is one which is entitled to the approval and the active support of the public as a whole.
This must be right.
I was particularly struck to learn from the Report of the lack of a reasonable promotion pyramid in the service. It is discouraging that, with few exceptions, the present system necessitates prison officers waiting apparently for 16 years before any promotion in rank. I understand that after 10 years an increase in pay is available if an officer passes the qualifying examination. The recommendation in the Report that an additional rank be created, that of senior prison officer, should be implemented; and I am glad that the Home Secretary talked sympathetically about this matter. I hope also that consideration will be given to promotion on merit instead of solely on length of service. which seems preponderantly to be the case at present.
My last point concerns a matter which I understand worries the service at governor level and, no doubt, at other levels. Since the Home Office took over


responsibilty from the Prison Commissioners, there has been a definite feeling within the service of a lack of contact and liaison between the service and the controlling Department. The change-over from the Prison Commission to the Home Office may have had many advantages but, in the old days, people felt that they were in touch with the top of the service. They knew the Commissioners, who were able to visit prisons regularly. They even knew the Chairman as a personality. According to the Report, apparently the Chief Director spends no less than 95 per cent. of the time in his office. He is, therefore, known as a very senior official at Whitehall and not as an identifiable professional head of the service.
That is all that I have time to say. I welcome the Report. Many eyebrows were raised at the appointment of Lord Mountbatten, but he has done an extraordinarily good job in producing this Report in such a short time. The Home Secretary said that he would vigorously implement many of the recommendations. We hope that he will be vigorous. If he is, he will certainly have the full support of the House.

9.18 p.m.

Mr. Richard Sharpies: The debate has ranged far and wide and has been notable for a number of thoughtful and constructive speeches on both sides, particularly that by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for St. Marylebone (Mr. Hogg).
I turn straightaway to the Report which has given rise to the debate. The real background is the main conclusion to which Lord Mountbatten came. He said this in paragraph 6:
I must say at the outset that there are clear weaknesses in physical security and in administration at prison level and in the Home Office.
The Report discloses—I make no apology for referring to these matters—some significant and rather curious omissions from the Home Secretary's speech on 31st October last. The right hon. Gentleman gave details of decisions which had been taken with regard to Blake's place of confinement up to June 1964. What he did not disclose was that in January 1966 the governor of Wormwood Scrubs Prison had put forward Blake's name as one of those to be trans-

ferred to the maximum security block at Parkhurst.
The right hon. Gentleman said that the June escapes were not a new factor, but he did not say that these had been the first escapes from "D" Hall since 1959. The Mountbatten Report, paragraph 71. says:
It is necessary for me to describe this incident in some detail"—
that is, the June escapes—
both because of its importance as an example of a serious recent escape, and because it should in my opinion have been an occasion for a serious reconsideration of the wisdom of keeping Blake in Wormwood Scrubs Prison.
There is no doubt that the June escapes constituted an entirely new factor in the security of Wormwood Scrubs Prison. Prisoners were able to escape from "D" Hall, after the police had been given warning that the escapes would take place, by the simple expedient of going out of the window instead of out of the door. Equally, it is extraordinary that, when the right hon. Gentleman himself visited Wormwood Scrubs Prison on 7th June, he was not told, and apparently did not even ask, whether a maximum security prisoner such as Blake was confined in "D" Hall from which the escapes had taken place.
It is true that, after the escapes on 6th June, additional security measures were ordered, but the question which the House must ask, and which the Home Secretary must answer, is why Blake was not moved in the meantime. Conditions of security at Wormwood Scrubs Prison must have been known even before the escape on 6th June. The director of prison security, so I was told in reply to a Question, had visited Wormwood Scrubs, his main visit having been on 15th April. He made his recommendations—I was told this also by the right hon. Gentleman in answer to a Question —for improved security in the prison on 29th April.
The questions which remain unanswered are these. Why was Blake not moved in January 1966 when the security wing at Parkhurst was opened and the governor of Wormwood Scrubs recommended his transfer? Second, why did the Home Secretary not reveal in his speech on 31st October that that recommendation had been made? It may well


have been that at the time when it was made the recommendation was not brought to his notice, but it is almost inconceivable that at the time when the right hon. Gentleman was preparing a speech to answer a Motion of censure on himself he was not then told that the recommendation had been made.
Third, why were instructions on the recommendations which the director of prison security had submitted on 29th April not given until 22nd June? It was during this interval that all the escapes from "D" Hall took place. Why was Blake not moved from Wormwood Scrubs when the deficiencies in the security wine at "D" Hall were revealed both by the report of the director of prison security and by the ease with which the escapes on 6th June took place? One major criticism I have of Lord Mountbatten's Report is that it fails to pin responsibility where responsibility lies, and that is the question which really faces us in considering the Report.
I now want to turn to the question of Mitchell.

Mr. Crawshaw: Mr. Crawshawrose——

Mr. Sharples: I have very little time and the Home Secretary and I agreed to give as much time as we could to back-benchers.
I want to turn to Mitchell's escape, because on 13th December the Home Secretary said:
My information is that since the decision … to put this prisoner on an outside working party was taken, as long ago as May 1965, his conduct until yesterday on this working party had been exemplary."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 13th December, 1966; Vol. 738. c. 252]
I am sure that that was the information the Home Secretary had at the time. But he became, to put it mildly, a little testy when some of us asked questions about the composition of the working party and what had been happening on it. The Home Secretary clearly had no idea at that time of what had been going on.
One of the most disturbing revelations of the Mountbatten Report is the failure in communication between the Prison Department at the Home Office and the Tavistock (Mr. Michael Heseltine) refer-prisons. My hon. Friend the Member for red at that time to his constituents' anxiety about what we now know to have

been going on on the working parties at Dartmoor.
I wish to make quite clear that I want to see outside working parties. I want to see hostels for prisoners and extensions of the hostel scheme, but I want those things done under proper conditions, and that is what we tried to probe at Question Time on 13th December. It was clear that the Home Secretary then had no idea of the conditions under which the working party had been operating or of the hold—and this is much more important—Mitchell had over the whole of the prison at Dartmoor at that time.
I shall not dwell on the mistakes which have been made, because they are clearly set out in the Mountbatten Report. The Report speaks for itself, and the conclusion reveals a situation from which no one from the Home Secretary downwards can draw any credit. The House wishes to be told the action the Home Secretary is taking to put matters right not only within the prisons, about which he has talked to a certain extent this afternoon, but also within his own administration at the Home Office. There can be little doubt that the right hon. Gentleman's speech about the duration of life sentences had some effect upon Mitchell's decision to escape, and it is very important when making speeches of that kind that we should bear in mind the effect they may have upon those serving very long sentences.
The question of whether Mitchell should have been at Dartmoor at all raises much wider, and in some ways, perhaps, rather more important, issues. Anyone who reads the account of Mitchell's history over the past 37 years cannot be too happy about the ability of our penal system to cope with cases of that kind. One only needs to look at paragraph 125 of the Report. At eight, he was found to be of sub-normal intellect. He was flogged. He was certified to be mentally defective, being feeble minded. He committed attempted murder. He was sentenced to nine years imprisonment. He was certified insane and then sentenced to life imprisonment, after which he was birched.
My concern is that there may well be a good many other potential Mitchells in the somewhat hazy area which lies between Broadmoor and Dartmoor, and as yet we would seem to have no clear ideas of the


best way of dealing with these very difficult cases. The House will be interested to hear what ideas the right hon. Gentleman has for dealing with the terribly difficult cases of the kind of Mitchells that there are in our prisons.
But the fact remains that, since the Government took office, Biggs has gone, Blake has gone and Mitchell has gone, and that, apart from some correspondence between the right hon. Gentleman and Mitchell, conducted through the newspapers, we have no idea of what has happened to any of them. My right hon. and learned Friend quoted a nursery rhyme relating to nurses. I am not quite so charitable. The nursery rhyme I would have in mind is to do with Little Bo-Peep.
I welcome the recommendations of the Mountbatten Report with regard to the classification of prisoners on the ground of security. I am glad to learn from the right hon. Gentleman that a start is being made to implement this aspect. But what I hope we may be able to do is introduce some much more sophisticated method of classification covering all prisoners, including the short-term prisoners, not only from the point of view of security but also from the point of view of treatment.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes) spoke of the system of classification in California. I believe that, in the end, if we are to get the right answers in our penal system, we shall have to look towards some such system. I do not believe that any effective system of classification, except only of a most elementary kind, can take place in the conditions which exist in our local prisons.
There is a particular problem with regard to the kind of prisoners who would go into Lord Mountbatten's Category A. In paragraph 202 the Report says:
The maximum security blocks which have been established at Parkhurst, Leicester and Durham prisons can in my view be no more than a temporary expedient. The conditions in these blocks are such as no country with a record of civilised behaviour would tolerate any longer than is absolutely essential as a stopgap measure.
For some time we have been hearing of a new maximum security prison at Albany in the Isle of Wight. My right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford referred to plans which existed when he

was at the Home Office and the report of the Prison Department for 1964 speaks of a special block in the design stage. On 10th February, 1965, in Standing Committee C, the Minister of State said:
It is our intention to build a new establishment in order that we may cope with particularly violent people who may or may not have murdered."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Standing Committee C 10th February, 1965; c. 98.]
I am not clear about two things. The first is whether this establishment is a continuation of the idea referred to in the 1964 Report of the Prison Department and referred to also by my right hon. Friend. I am not clear from what the right hon. Lady said whether this establishment is intended to cover prisoners such as Blake.
But on 3rd March, 1965, nearly two years ago, the Minister of State said this when referring to her earlier speech:
I spoke of a prison which would be extremely secure and where very long-term prisoners would be able to serve their sentences. That prison is to be at Albany, in the Isle of Wight. and we are going ahead with the project."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Standing Committee C, 3rd March, 1965; c. 243.]
Today we were told by the right hon. Gentleman that the very earliest date by which that prison can be opened and available for occupation is June, 1969. The stop-gap measure referred to in the Mountbatten Report will have to remain a fairly permanent arrangement for quite a long time.
Like a number of those who have spoken today, I believe that the majority of people who make up our prison population have no intention of trying to escape. They are not all Blakes or train robbers or people of that kind, and they are not all violent criminals or even professionals. I believe that the majority of people in prison are the kind of people referred to by my right hon. and learned Friend—people who have made serious mistakes and are paying the penalty for what they have done. What the majority of them want to do is to get their sentences over with as little trouble as possible.
The hon. Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton (Mr. Archer) referred to paragraph 318 of the Report. There is, therefore, no need for me to refer to it, but I draw it to the attention of the House. When people escape it is not usually to commit further crimes but


because of the overwhelming circumstance of some family or domestic crisis at home. Yet it is people of this kind, combined with the drunks and the inadequates, who make up the vast majority of the population of our out-of-date, semi-secure and wholly insanitary local prisons.
Many of the problems could be resolved by the adoption of a proper classification system and by giving greater opportunities for family contacts, as was referred to in paragraph 23 of the Report. We should take further risks in the use of open prisons for not only longer term prisoners but short term prisoners.
Lord Butler, when he was Home Secretary, started the process of bringing our penal system up to date. "Penal Practice in a Changing Society" was the title of the White Paper produced by his administration. It is, I believe, a landmark in the history of penal thinking. He started the process of rethinking the purpose of our penal system and of producing prisons to meet the needs of a modern society. The tremendous opportunity of carrying forward the work started by Lord Butler has been lost in the disbandment of the Royal Commission on penal reform.
The Government have already had to cut back on prison expenditure. Implementation of the recommendations of the Mountbatten Report will, in the words of the Report itself,
cost money—probably a lot of money.
There is not only the question of building but the question of an adequate system of classification, referred to by my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford. Much of the success or failure of the Home Secretary's proposals will depend upon the amount of money which he is able to obtain from the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
In the few minutes which remain, I want to say something about prison officers. It is no use thinking that we can solve the problems of our penal system simply by building more prisons to accommodate the prisoners. It is just as important to have the prison officers to man them.
In Lord Mountbatten's Report, he states:

I would like to leave as my final impression a feeling of profound admiration for the devotion of the prison service as a whole, in the face of tremendous difficulties and much misunderstanding of their work.
I join wholeheartedly in that tribute to those in the prison service.
There is, however, no doubt that the Prison Service is grossly under-manned for the work which it has to do. The problems which are posed by the greater liberty which exists in prisons today, association and opportunities for study—all these create new demands on prison staff. We talk about work in prisons. This, too. creates additional demand on the prison staff.
Perhaps I might quote from the evidence which was submitted by the Prison Officers' Association about this problem:
… the shortage of staff in Pentonville was such that during the period of special precautions following Blake's escape it was possible on one morning for prisoners to spend only a quarter of an hour actually in the workshops (from 11.15 a.m. to 11.30 a.m.) and the next day there was no workshop labour until the afternoon
That is the reality of establishing factories inside or outside prisons for prisoners to work in.
When one considers the question of security from the prison officers' viewpoint, this is what they say:
The existing overcrowding and shortage at staff create conditions in which chief officers have no option but to take landing officers from their landings for long periods every day in order to meet urgent day-to-day needs. Our information is that this practice was a frequent happening in 'D' Wing at Wormwood Scrubs, where some 340 prisoners were accommodated at the time of Blake's escape—about 130 of them murderers serving life sentences!
The total establishment in "D" Hall at that time was four prison officers.
I would like in conclusion to pay my tribute to the work of Lord Mountbatten in producing his Report so quickly and under such difficult conditions, but I must make it clear that I share the reservations of my right hon. and learned Friend. We still do no know the answers to the majority of the questions which are raised in the Report. We still do not know what has happened to the prisoners after they have gone over the prison wall. We still do not know why the administrative machine has been so ineffective, and we still do not know the extent of the right


hon. Gentleman's responsibility in all these matters.
The task of the Home Secretary is enormous. We appreciate that. Certainly, we hope that he succeeds in the task which he has set himself. We must make it clear, however, that we shall judge him by the results he produces.

9.45 p.m.

Mr. Roy Jenkins: I speak again with the permission of the House. The hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Mr. Sharples), apart perhaps from his closing sentences, struck a rather sharper note than we have heard hitherto in the debate. I make no complaint about that, first because I think it is his natural and necessary style, and secondly because he asked some fairly shrewd questions.
He asked some questions about Blake. I think the best answer I can give him to those questions is that in paragraph 76 of his Report, Lord Mountbatten makes it clear that Home Secretaries until my time had never concerned themselves with the personal allocation of prisoners. I believe that the time when that can continue to be the case has now ceased, and it has now ceased. It is a heavy additional responsibility for a Home Secretary but I was following what was the long-established practice until the time I took office and until some time after I took office.
We have in general had an extremely useful, but on the whole an amicable, debate. It has been noticeable that the right hon. Member for Streatham (Mr. Sandys), who played a very important part in the debate in October and was issuing a great number of statements, as is his wont whenever any issue catches the headlines—for example, at the time of escapes—has not honoured us with his presence for a single moment today. Apart from being deprived of his presence, we have had a constructive debate, and the right hon. and learned Member for St. Marylebone (Mr. Hogg) made a very valuable contribution to it. I should like to begin by making one or two comments on the points he raised. If I pick out one or two points on which I wish to reply to him, he must not assume that the greater part of his speech did not command my enthusiastic agreement.
First, he said that no staff college or effective training college existed for prison officers. This is not the case. No doubt, some improvements could be made to them, but there are very good courses at the Staff College at Wakefield, which has been going since 1946. We hope to improve it. He also said—and there is a danger here—that prison officers were a group apart. This was taken up by the right hon. Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes). There is a danger of this in all bodies like that of prison officers, but it is a fact that several hundreds of them have recently been engaging in extra-mural courses with people outside. This is a very good thing and a general tendency which we want to encourage.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman and his right hon. Friend, and possibly one or two other hon. Members, also raised the question of the demise of the Royal Commission and accused me of having, not murdered it, but connived at its murder. We have had an exchange on this before. I must try to correct the right hon. and learned Gentleman. I do not suppose that he will accept my correction. I certainly did not murder the Royal Commission or connive at its murder. What I was forced to do, without wishing it, was to accept the fact that I could not prevent it committing suicide. This is a very different position, but I hope that the Advisory Council which I have set up may perform nearly all the functions which the Commission performed. It would be interesting to consider whether it would be useful to ask it to address itself to some of the wider philosophical questions which the right hon. and learned Gentleman raised and which perhaps we are too anxious to gloss over, and not to ask for a fundamental approach to them.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman, like the right hon. Member for Ashford, had some harsh things to say about the Home Office and the Prison Department of the Home Office. The Prison Department within the Home Office has, in my view, responded with tremendous enthusiasm and speed to the challenge set to it by the Mountbatten Report. I do not think I would have been able to give such a good report of what we have done had the Prison Department not been extremely anxious to make a new beginning,


and with great vigour, in the course of the last few months. I have every confidence in the work it is doing at the present time.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith, North (Mr. Tomney)—who told me that he would not be able to be here for the wind-up to the debate—raised an important point about the difficulties facing prison officers when they retire in middle age and lose their "tied cottages". They have difficulties about finding houses. He asked if I would consult local authorities about this problem. I will indeed consider this problem, which is a very real one. On retirement, prison officers get a lump sum gratuity—not enormous, but something which is a contribution towards finding alternative accommodation, and they are not unique in this position. Police officers are often in a somewhat similar position, but I think my hon. Friend drew attention, and rightly, to a real problem, and I will gladly give further consideration to this point.
The right hon. Member for Ashford, who spoke next, made a number of interesting points. He suggested that the directive which was issued to prison governors as soon as the new Deputy Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office took up his job immediately after Christmas was unfair of me in the sense that I was trying to suggest that prison governors had failed in their duty. I do not think that this is so, and I do not think that the directive or the letter in any way conveyed this impression. What I thought was essential at that time was to convey to prison governors that they should in the immediate future give a somewhat higher priority to security than they had been doing in the past, and I think that had I not done this I would have been open to very heavy criticism indeed. There was no question of allocating blame, and still less of trying to shuffle off responsibility. It is noticeable that in all the most notorious escapes which we have been discussing no disciplinary proceedings have been taken or considered against prison officers. There is no desire to shuffle off blame in this way.
The right hon. Gentleman also asked why progress with the new maximum security prison had not been faster than it was. I think that there is here an

element of misunderstanding, a perfectly comprehensible one. The prison which my right hon. Friend the Minister of State talked about during the debates on the death penalty Bill two years ago was to be a maximum security wing within the new Albany Prison, a wing which would have been subject to most, but not necessarily all, the disadvantage of the maximum security wings at the three existing prisons in which we have such wings.
It subsequently became clear that what we wanted was a separate prison, and this necessarily involved the drawing up of new plans, and fairly complicated plans, in order to provide the degree of security which we had not hitherto had, and in order also to guard against determined rescue attempts from outside, to which the right hon. and learned Gentleman drew attention, and with which we had not hitherto been faced. We had advanced quite quickly with these plans, but I thought it was pure common sense, when we got to the Mountbatten stage, to wait and see whether the Inquiry endorsed our plans. Within two months it did broadly endorse our plans, but asked for a 50 per cent. increase in size, and we are progressing as rapidly as we can with the building of that prison.

Mr. Deedes: I accept that, but the right hon. Gentleman must admit that there was an official mistake in the original concept about this building.

Mr. Jenkins: That may be so, but we are at the present time doing what I think is best, and in fact had we proceeded along the original lines, we would have found that the Mountbatten Report said that we ought to have been proceeding on different lines, so the passage of time has by no means been a total disadvantage, but it is crucial that we should now go as fast as we can.
The hon. Member for the Isle of Wight (Mr. Woodnutt) has a great constituency interest in all these matters and I am grateful to him for the remarks that he made and for the general attitude that he has taken on these difficult problems. He will, I know, be glad to learn—although I do not regard it as the most important aspect of the subject—that in reply to his requests, and those of some others, and after consultation with Lord Mountbatten in his capacity as Governor of the Isle of Wight, we have decided not


to press ahead with the name Vectis, though I am not terribly attracted by the present alternative, which I think is Forest Side, as it is rather too reminiscent of a Californian cemetery to be entirely appropriate from the prison point of view. But I hope we can find some name which suffers from neither of these disadvantages.

Mr. Woodnutt: Why does not the right hon. Gentleman name it Overner, the Island word for mainlanders? After all, mainlanders will be occupying the prison.

Mr. Jenkins: I shall be grateful for any suggestions from the hon. Gentleman, or indeed from other sources.
My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Toxteth (Mr. Crawshaw) raised the question that we perhaps needed three categories and not four.
He said that we needed the maximum security group and beyond that we could divide everyone simply into close or open prisons. I do not entirely agree with him, although I do not think it is a matter of deep principle. In the B category we need people who are fairly dangerous, and in the C category we need people who require some supervision. In the D category we could have people who can be left completely alone. The hon. Member for Salisbury (Mr. Michael Hamilton) raised the point, which was also taken up by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer) and by my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, East (Mr. Edward Lyons). It was the advantage of selling the valuable sites in the centre of big cities and building outside on less valuable ground. There are two problems, neither of them necessarily insuperable, associated with that project.
The first is that in the case of our city gaols, the sites in most cases are owned not by the Home Office, but by local authorities, which presents a certain problem. Secondly, the problem involved in a big prison building programme is to a large extent one of money, but it is also one of resources. This has to be borne in mind when dealing with capitalising the value of the existing sites. But this approach is a valuable one with which I am broadly in agreement. My hon. Friend the Member for Eton and Slough (Miss Lestor) raised the point

about the great difficulties presented by very long sentences and the almost inevitable incentive which this gave the prisoner to escape, if he had nothing before him but a very long period of imprisonment.
To some extent our parole proposals in the Criminal Justice Bill offer at least a ray of hope in this respect. One must also face up to, and we have not hitherto done this, the question of dealing with confinement in maximum security conditions for long periods and yet in tolerable conditions. There are examples, particularly in the United States, and I was very struck by what I saw in the Federal Prison at Leavenworth in Kansas. It is possible to do this, compatible with a fairly free régime in the prison, with good security round the prison perimeter and a good deal of effective prison work, in a way that we have not yet achieved here but which I hope we may be able to achieve in the future.
The hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Mr. Dance) raised the question of the prisoner Maxwell. I would say to him in passing that people may take different views on this, but I am sure that no Home Secretary of either party in the last 10 years would have taken a different decision to the one that I did on this particular case. The hon. Member for Inverness (Mr. Russell Johnston) had some of his points replied to by the Under-Secretary of State for the Scottish Office. He also raised the point about the need for a new security manual, asking whether it did not suggest that we had not applied ourselves to this problem for the future. There are prison standing orders which deal, amongst other things. with security.
We have a new problem, to which the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for St. Marylebone drew attention of rescues from outside. This is a new security problem and it is appropriate that we should face up to this. The hon. Member for Bristol, West (Mr. Robert Cooke), in whose tour we were glad to be able to assist—and I am glad that it gave him some useful points to put before the House—raised the question of Cuts in prison buildings before the Mountbatten proposals. He ought to look at the position now that we have the Mountbatten proposals, and see what we are doing from this time forward.


My hon. Friend the Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton (Mr. Archer) dealt with the psychology of prisoners and I take note of what he said. The hon. Member for Chichester (Mr. Loveys) made a number of points about the morale of prison officers and the need for the prison service to be looked up to to a much greater extent than has been the case in the past. I think that he very slightly underestimated the extent to which we responded, not merely sympathetically, but positively, and acted upon the proposals of the Mountbatten Report in this respect. We have agreed that the new grade of senior prison officer shall be introduced, and we hope that it will be introduced by the autumn of this year. I believe that in this and other ways we are showing our determination to act upon these recommendations, and are giving a brighter prospect for the prison service and a better hope for an effective penal system in this country.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,
That this House takes note of the Report of the Inquiry into Prison Escapes and Security (Command Paper No. 3175).

CONSOLIDATION, &c., BILLS

Mr. Elystan Morgan discharged from the Select Committee appointed to join with a Select Committee appointed by the Lords on Consolidation, &c., Bills; Mr. David Ensor added.—[Mr. Lawson.]

ESTIMATES

Mr. Peter Bessell discharged from the Estimates Committee; Mr. Philip Holland added.—[Mr. Lawson.]

ADJOURNMENT

Resolved, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Bishop.]>

Adjourned accordingly at one minute past Ten o'clock.